Touchpoint Vol. 3 No. 1 - Learning, Changing, Growing

volume 3 | no. 1 | 12,80 euro

May 2011

Learning, Changing, Growing • Being Led or Finding the Way? Mary Cook and Joseph Harrington

• Better Services for the People Sylvia Harris and Chelsea Mauldin

• Using Service Design Education

to Design University Services Jürgen Faust

Touchpoint Touchpoint

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Volume 3, No. 1

Unless otherwise stated,

May 2011

the copyrights of all images used for

The Journal of Service Design

illustration lie with the author(s) of the

ISSN 1868-6052

respective article

Publisher

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Service Design Network

Tim Danaher

Chief Editor

Printing

Birgit Mager

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Editorial Board

Fonts

Jeff Howard

Mercury G3

Dianna Miller

Whitney Pro

Andy Polaine

Service Design Network

Advisory Board

Köln International

Kerry Bodine

School of Design

Shelley Evenson

Prof. Birgit Mager

Jesse Grimes

Ubierring 40

Jeff Howard

D-50678 Cologne

Craig La Rosa

Germany

Coordination Miriam Becker Design

www. service-design-network.org Advertising Sales Miriam Becker

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contents

May 2011

Learning, Changing, Growing 06 From the Editors 08 News chapter # 1

Learning, Changing, Growing 12 Service Strategy Paradoxes Robert Bau

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16 Being Led or Finding the Way? Mary Cook and Joseph Harrington

22 Corporate Culture is Key to

Improving Call Centre Services Kerry Bodine

chapter # 2

Inspiring Learning 26 Growing on its own: Energie-Labor Patrik Frauzem and Ellen Simmons

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30 Better Services for the People Sylvia Harris and Chelsea Mauldin

36 Local Authorities: Tackling Engagement Challenges Together

Julie McManus and Jonas Piet

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contents

chapter # 3

Service Design Education 40 Using Service Design Education to Design University Services JĂźrgen Faust

46 Teaching Service Design to Design Students Ariel Guersenzvaig

50 Late to the Party?

Andy Polaine

52 Prototyping a Service Design Curriculum Johan Blomkvist, Stefan Holmlid, Fabian SegelstrĂśm

56 Teaching Co-Design Jeff Howard

58 Better Services for Better Lives Elena Pacenti

62 A Critical Approach to Service Design

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Education

Lara Penin

66 Designing a Service Design Curriculum Renna Al-Yassini, Miso Kim and Steve Selzer chapter # 4

Background Stories 74 Service Jamming Around the World Vanja Misic

76 Service Jamming in Cologne, Germany Ione Ardaiz Osacar

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78 SDN: Growing, Learning, Changing.

Birgit Mager

81 Service Design Network Austria Has Come Alive!

Reinhard Willfort and Roland Winkler

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82 Service Designing: A Network for Service Designers, by Service Designers Lauren Tan, Nick Marsh and Jaimes Nel

Service Design Snapshots 86 Competitive Edge: Service Design Challenges Birgit Mager

86 The Value of Craft: Service Design Thinking And Making

Jeff Howard

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87 Book Review: This Is Service Design Thinking Birgit Mager

88 Dos & Don’ ts 90 Member Map

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from the editors

Letter from the Editors

Birgit Mager is professor for service design at Köln International School of Design (KISD), Cologne, Germany. She is founder and director of sedes research – the centre for service design research at KISD. Besides she is co-founder of Service Design Network and chief editor of Touchpoint.

Jeff Howard edits the popular weblog ‘Design for Service’, a wide-ranging collection of research, patterns and observation focused on service design. For the past four years he has chronicled the emergence and development of the practice in the United States and around the world. He currently works as a designer and researcher in San Francisco.

Learn, Grow, Change In the 1990s, the Cologne-based Köln International School of Design (KISD) was the only university teaching service design in an academic design context and was the only place where service design projects took place, testing and growing the body of knowledge and experience.

Since then, a lot of learning, change and growth has taken place. The service design community has grown and has developed a confident professionalism, based on deepening roots in the scientific community, on a growing demand from service industries and institutions for user related research and design and also on successful projects, conferences and publications.

That was my dream in the mid 1990s, but I would not have dared believe that it would happen: companies are creating service design departments, they are employing both in-house and external service designers, more and more agencies are successfully bringing service design to the market and all over the world, academic institutions are creating the educational framework for service design. This is a pressing issue, and we need well educated and highly skilled service designers to go into research, teaching and practice. We need bachelor and master programs, we need Ph.D programs and we need an intense collaboration and conversation on an international level, in order to learn from each other in the field of education.

This issue of Touchpoint delivers insights into some of the really interesting processes of designing service design education.

Education for service design is a challenge: not least due to the fact that the discipline itself is engaged in a continuous process of learning and growing, and thus we are facing a changing demand for the relevant skills that service designers need to bring to projects.

During its formative years, service design has been focusing on the user, on the experiences, the touchpoints and the evidences. Stakeholder maps and service ecologies, design probes, design games, exploration- and self-exploration tools, storytelling, storyboarding, role-

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playing, co-creation, personas and prototypes were the buzzwords. It was a fabulous time of experimentation, of applying to services concepts and methods that were rooted in design. It was a time of inventing and testing new, service-related design methods. This lies at the heart of the service design discipline, and its application brings valuable and impactful results to clients and partners.

Over the years, service design has moved beyond the interface and it now systematically touches strategic, organisational and cultural issues. Often, we find that service design projects lead to organisational and cultural change. So we need to integrate that knowledge into service design education and we need to refine and develop tools that are relevant for processes of change on a strategic and organisational level. This issue of Touchpoint also gives examples of the changing role of service design and the incredible amount of learning that is taking place.

With this issue, Touchpoint is celebrating its 3rd birthday! It has also learnt and adapted.

We are delighted to introduce our Touchpoint advisory board (see ‘Inside SDN‘), who will help to professionalise and to grow the journal. We have already worked out changes in structure and content that will affect the autumn issue. We will have a regular column from Kerry Bodine of Forrester that will connect service design to the relevant markets and business trends. The main theme of the issue will take up less space, and the requirements on quality of content and style will become more stringent. We will introduce two new sections: the academic section and a section on methods and cases. In these, we will apply in-depth analysis of methods and the results of projects and will encourage discussion of the cases at hand.

Dianna Miller is professor and programme coordinator for the service design BFA/MFA programme at Savannah College of Art & Design. She has twenty years experience as an interaction designer, user researcher, project manager, and content strategist.

Dr. Andy Polaine is lecturer and research fellow in service design at the Lucerne School of Art and Design in Switzerland. He is cowriting a book on service design for Rosenfeld Media along with live|work co-founders, Ben Reason and Lavrans Løvlie.

And another change: all past issues of Touchpoint are now available as e-books. This is especially interesting, because it saves on shipping costs and time, as well as energy. These savings are passed directly on to our readers.

Please let us know your thoughts: we want to learn, change and grow together with you!

Birgit Mager

For the editorial board

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news

Service Design Conference in San Francisco

Sunday Service Norway As an extension to Oslo's Global Service Design Jam, Ingvild Sundby and a group of like-minded people have launched Norway's first service design book club. All service jammers and service design enthusiasts are welcome to join Sunday Service, a monthly meeting dedicated to design thinking, service design, and overall awesomeness!

The first meeting took place on April 10 at Oslo Mek, a cafe in the centre of Norway's capital. Look up further information, dates and venues at the Sunday Service facebook site: facebook.com/?ref=logo#!/event. php?eid=204579039567658) or follow them on Twitter: @SunServOslo

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The preparation for this year's SDN conference in the USA are in full swing. The topic ‘From Sketchbook to Spreadsheet’ is about exploring the critical relationship between service design and business. The call for contributions is open now!

In the process of planning the conference, the decision was made not to hold it in Savannah but in San Francisco! Our conference co-chairs Alex Nisbett and Jamin Hegeman explain the reasons: “As we’ve been outlining the initial vision and strategy for this year's Service Design Network conference, we came to the conclusion that we needed a more internationally acces-

sible location in the United States, one that would be easy to reach from both Europe and Asia. With this new thinking, we decided to change the location from Savannah to San Francisco.

We are currently working on the location details and will keep everyone informed of our progress via our website blog that is in the works.

We are really excited about this year's conference, and are working to make it the best experience possible for everyone, while also advancing the practice and business of service design.

This change in location, while a tough decision, is part of that effort to best serve the international service design community. See you all in San Francisco!”

Hand in your contribution at bit.ly/sdnconf2011-call

photo: Rich Niewiroski Jr

EU Funds International Research Project on Service Design in Tourism The European Union has granted funding for an international research project on service design in tourism, entitled ‘Service Design as an Approach to Foster Competitiveness and Sustainability of European Tourism.’ Initiated

by MCI Management Center Innsbruck (Austria), the project combines the expertise of nine European partner institutions from seven countries across the fields of service design and tourism: AHO University (Norway), Hotel School Den Haag (Netherlands), Innovation Norway (Norway), Linköping University (Sweden), Making Waves (Norway), Savonia University of Applied Sciences (Finland), SKEMA Business School (France) and Tourismuszukunft (Germany). Started in March 2011, the initiative is scheduled for 18 months with a budget of €440,000 as part of the EU's Competitiveness and Innovation Framework Programme (CIP).

The project aims to apply service design thinking to the

tourism industry. Based on the KISD Students Win Philips prototype of a mobile ethnography Service Innovation Award application called ‘myServiceFellow’, the research strives to further The task of the first Service develop the application and evaluate Innovation Award was to develop its usability in practice through creative service concepts for seven pilot projects in various DirectLife, a product created by European tourism destinations. The Philips. DirectLife is an activity underlying idea is to apply service programme that combines Smart design thinking to problems service Technology with well-proven designers face in the field of tourism, coaching methods to motivate rather than using classic exploratory its user tobe more active and to design methods, to better address exercise in everyday life, thereby the spatial and temporal dimension contributing to a healthier lifestyle. of customer journeys in tourism.

The competition was The project includes a series of tough: participants came from institutional education workshops the Köln International School of on the applicability and benefits of Design (KISD), RWTH Aachen service design thinking, particularly and Maastricht University and all for tourism destinations and their had varying backgrounds, from respective small- and micro-sized engineering to business studies. service providers.

Nevertheless, the concept The project will culminate presented by the team of KISD, led in a book, presenting mobile

by Prof. Birgit Mager, won over the ethnography for service design Jury of representatives of Philips, exemplified through seven pilot RWTH Aachen and Maastricht studies in tourism. Furthermore, University. Congratulations! an international conference on service design in tourism will bring together professionals from academia and business to exchange d in Intereste esign e ic rv d knowledge and experiences at more se cribe to the bs u S Innsbruck in the summer of 2012. sider news? sletter In ServiceDesignTourism.com myServiceFellow.com

w SDN ne t previa look a or have ues here: ous iss ninsider bit.ly/sd

Contact person: Marc Stickdorn, Lecturer for Service Design & Innovation, Management Center Innsbruck, Austria

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chapter # 1

Learning, Changing, Growing

Developing Service Design and Employing Service Design for Development

By Robert Bau

Service Strategy Paradoxes Understanding the Strategic Nature of Services

Robert Bau is an independent strategist and design thinker who divides his time between consulting, mentoring, speaking and writing. He also lectures and teaches at design schools in Sweden and the UK.

Far too many service designers – both students and professionals – fall into the ‘touchpoint design’ trap.

Very early on in the process, they focus their efforts on mapping, analysing and redesigning customer-facing touchpoints throughout the service delivery system.

Also, in keeping with the touchpoint theme, many designers think, speak and work in terms of attributes and benefits such as usefulness, accessibility, usability, reliability and desirability.

This ‘touchpoint design’ approach is not ideal in the fuzzy frontend (FFE)1 of service innovation and design projects, where the emphasis is on identifying strategic opportunities, framing strategic problems, searching for alternative solutions and drafting customer value propositions. Attributes and benefits are better suited as evaluation criteria (to compare and assess ideas, concepts, prototypes, solutions, etc.) rather than guiding principles (to inform, inspire and direct the innovation process).

Since key FFE activities are often experimental, ambiguous, chaotic, unpredictable and unstructured, specific methods and tools are sorely needed to encourage strategic thinking, explore open-ended problems and

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’un-fuzzify’ the FFE2. One solution may be the Framework for Service Strategy Dichotomies and Paradoxes. 3 Inspired by dichotomies and paradoxes in strategic management literature4, I have identified ten strategy dichotomies that reflect strategic perspectives, issues and megatrends in service management, service marketing, service innovation and service design.

Each dichotomy highlights two opposing, and seemingly contradictory, perspectives (see table).

All ten dichotomies can be treated as paradoxes. A paradox is a situation in which two seemingly contradictory – or even mutually exclusive – factors are held to be true at the same time5. Service providers and service designers should

learning, changing, growing

accept the conflict between the opposites and search for ways to reconcile them.

Designing for Inclusion vs.

Designing for Exclusion Each dichotomy poses a strategic challenge for service providers and service designers alike. Take, for example, the inclusion-exclusion dichotomy. Should we design for inclusion? Should we design for exclusion? Or should we design for reconciliation: trying to achieve both extremes at the same time?

Designing for inclusion is about making services as appealing, accessible and affordable to as many people as reasonably possible. It is also about involving customers in the development, production, distribution and marketing of products, services and experiences.

Key inclusion themes include inclusive design, co-creation, crowdsourcing, customer control (self-service), availability, affordability and even good old-fashioned mass marketing (going after the whole market with one offer).

Examples of inclusion include: Skånetrafiken, a Swedish public transport company (making busses and trains accessible to people with reduced sensory, cognitive and motor capabilities); My Starbucks Idea (inviting customers to submit, share and discuss ideas for improvement); Friskis&Svettis,

a Swedish non-profit chain of keep-fit clubs (attracting people who do not feel comfortable in pretentious, elitist gyms); Cyclocity, a self-service bicycle scheme from JCDecaux; WeSC, a Swedish street fashion brand (enticing users to become brand ambassadors and “activists”); and Baker Street Dental Group (providing round-the-clock dentistry in London).

The opposite of inclusion is exclusion. While many services tend to exclude users for the wrong reasons – inadequate feature sets, poor availability, excessive lifecycle costs, language issues, physical barriers and so on – designing for exclusion can actually be a sound and viable strategy for some providers if executed well. Services that are designed to address the needs and desires of specific segments, groups and individuals, or services that deliberately limit access and availability in different ways, may very well be perceived to be highly desirable, meaningful and aspirational.

service strategy dichotomy designing for inclusion vs. designing for exclusion designing for simplicity vs. designing for complexity designing for consistency vs. designing for flexibility designing for tangibility vs. designing for intangibility designing for interdependency vs. designing for independency designing for authenticity vs. designing for simulation designing for ephemerality vs. designing for longevity

The Framework for Service Strategy Dichotomies and Paradoxes.

designing for acceleration vs. designing for de-acceleration designing for stakeholder productivity vs. designing for resource productivity designing for evolution vs. designing for revolution

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By Robert Bau

Examples of exclusion include: segmentation-based offerings (the Canary, Dolphin, Racoon, Panther and Monkey monthly tariffs from telecom company Orange); customisation and personalisation services (Nike iD, Builda-Bear Workshop, Moonpig); loyaltybased offerings and services (Hilton HHonors, IKEA Family); super-premium services (private asset management, global 24/7 concierge services); and services for seclusion and privacy (VIP areas in public spaces, adult-only resorts, members-only clubs with hidden entrances, invitation-only credit cards, anonymous browsing).

An interesting example of reconciling the two extremes of inclusion and exclusion is the range of Islamic banking services offered by High Street banks in the UK, such as HSBC. On the one hand, Sharia-compliant financial products for Muslims can be seen as narrowly targeted offerings. On the other hand, people whose faith had prevented them from using standard High Street products can now gain access to financial services.

The Relevance to Service Design In the FFE of service innovation and design projects, development and design teams can use the Framework for Service Strategy Dichotomies and Paradoxes to switch between relevant perspectives, identify points of view, challenge assumptions, contextualise problems, generate alternative problems and solutions and even defy design-related myths (like ‘keep it simple’). In addition, multi-functional, multi-disciplinary and multi-cultural teams can use the

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framework to create a common frame of reference and build a shared vocabulary.

According to my experience, service strategy dichotomies and paradoxes help design professionals and students to truly understand the strategic nature of services. Touchpoint design is important but should not be the starting point of an innovation process.

•

References 1,2 Koen et al. (2002) Fuzzy Front End: Effective Methods, Tools, and Techniques. In: Belliveau et al. (eds.) The PDMA ToolBook 1 for New Product Development. US: Wiley.

3 Bau, R. (2010). Ten Strategy Paradoxes in Service Innovation and Design. Conceptual paper presented at the Nordic conference ServDes. [Online] Retrieved February 25, 2011, from http://www.servdes.org/pdf/ bau.pdf 4,5 De Wit, B. & Meyer, R. (1998). Strategy. Process, Content, Context. UK: Thomson Business Press.

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Being Led or Finding the Way?

flickr.com/photos/thomashawk/52368779/sizes/o/in/photostream/

Understanding the Role of Ethics in Design Practice

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By Mary Cook and Joseph Harrington

What we do is evolving. There can be very little argument that service design is finding itself in some odd places these days, from working to reduce crime, to supporting disarmament processes, to actively shaping public policy. We are finding ourselves enacting new roles and slipping over the boundaries and borders of traditional disciplines. These strange new worlds, full of the weird and wonderful, abundant with glittering opportunities to show off how creative and positive thinking can really get to grips with the stuff that matters. But with these opportunities come new and unchartered challenges that question our practice, our behaviours and our ethics.

Surely we have no excuse. There are growing lists of ethical guidelines, and with a quick search we can have hundreds of them printed out and plastered across the walls of our studios.

But what is the value of these guidelines and how do they help us do our work better and more responsibly?

If we look to other disciplines, such as the social sciences, law and medicine, and examine their approach to ethics, at the forefront we encounter complex and statutory regulations upheld by large governing bodies. These organisations, with their oak doors and annual reports on heavyweight paper, play the role of describing and detailing sets of requirements to ensure the ethical conduct of their members.

For the practitioners and organisations within these fields, conforming to these sets of requirements is often the

only legal option, as breaking the code comes with the promise of expulsion and institutional exclusion.

Although design has a handful of organisations that advocate ethical standards, they exist exclusively as membership groups, where subscribers sign up to just consider a set of ethical principles. These are not regulatory bodies, and there is no legal imperative to subscribe to them. Instead they offer association in return for affiliation and membership with the promise of logos and other superficial designations.

The threat of legal action is rarely necessary to enforce ethical conduct, but the current incentives seem woefully inadequate.

These organisations often promote ethical conduct through a series of highlevel principles or ‘codes of conduct’.

A good example would be this extract

Mary Cook is a director and the cofounder of Uscreates. Mary’s role involves overseeing the strategic direction and development of the company.

Joseph Harrington is an associate of Uscreates.

He has a background in service design in the public sector and is the co-founder of the organisation Katz & Harrington.

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By Mary Cook and Joseph Harrington

from the Chartered Society of Designers: “… cause as little harm as possible either directly or indirectly to … living creatures, endangered species of plant or fauna, the atmosphere, rivers, seas and the land.”

Although there is very little argument to be made against statements such as these, how do they actually help us to do our work better and more responsibly?

“In 2010, Uscreates started a programme to investigate this question and to further understand the role of ethics in commercial and academic organisations.”

A core principal for this programme was to work closely and in collaboration with practitioners and academics and not to perpetuate the closed-loop nature of the current review process of ethical conduct. So, from the early stages of the programme, we hosted a number of ‘ethics breakfasts’, all fairtrade coffee and organic toast. Sessions brought together groups of service design practitioners and academics from a range of organisations and institutions to share stories of narrowly averted disaster and to openly discuss how day-to-day practice could engage with notions of ethics.

The sessions revealed a clear issue: ethics as a component of design practice is lacking any understood value. Instead, current rhetoric focuses on formalising ethics in practice to ensure that mechanisms are in place to legally protect an individual or organisation. Participants of the ethics-breakfast sessions identified the problematic nature of the exchange

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these institutions exist to enact: that of value through association. The central concern aired was that they do not afford any sustained or meaningful interaction: any opportunity for reciprocal action or influence. Participants argued that although these often-protectionist structures are necessary, there is a need for something a bit more meaningful: a further and sustained type of engagement in order to really examine and engage with the key issues faced by the industry.

The call from these sessions was that no longer should ethics be a box we tick in order to cover our backs, but instead an opportunity to actively reflect on and develop our practice.

But making this case is relatively easy from the safe confines of a studio in South London, drinking free coffee with designers wearing colourful socks. The challenge described by participants involved making the case in the commercial world. Even for the academics in the sessions, it was apparent that their direct affiliation with more commercial enterprise meant the amount of time available for investigation

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learning, changing, growing

of issues such as ethics was rapidly diminishing. However, for those who took part, the value of the interactions afforded by the breakfast sessions lingered: the reflections captured had been productive and meaningful, even during those stolen hours of the early morning.

Beyond this value, another challenge became clear: any conversational investigation of ethics was very unpractised. There was a lack of a useful shared vocabulary or discourse, with both practitioners and academics struggling to settle on a useful dialogue to penetrate the flabby exterior of ethics. It became evident that, in order to continue to investigate ethics as a meaningful component of practice and to make a decent case for its value, there was a need to have a useful and

shared ethics discourse to support more productive debate.

And so the aim of our programme resolved to support the development of a shared ethics discourse for design.

A key starting point was easy: more conversations. We wanted to explore the hypothesis that practitioners simply taking the time to discuss ethics, ranging from perceived issues within their work to broad concepts of ethics in practice, would support the development of discourse. At the end of 2010, we launched a short pilot programme called Ethics Buddy to bring design practitioners and academics together to explore how creating opportunities for more conversations would develop a shared discourse. Four academics met four practitioners for two conversations lasting around an hour

Mary during an ethics interview with a service design researcher, Alan Boyles 2. Ethics breakfast session with service design pratctioners | 3. Co-creation sessions with front-line staff and discussing ethics in practice.

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2.

3.

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By Mary Cook and Joseph Harrington

The “ethics guide booklet” includes an overview of the project, plus profiling and discussion tools and topic guides to support participants of the ethics buddy programme.

each. We acted as broker and facilitator, matchmaking participants and providing each buddy with a Buddy Guide. These guides provided participants with some prompts, along with simple profiling and reflection tools to support and capture conversations.

To examine the outcomes of the conversations between participants, Uscreates either observed them directly, taking notes in the corners of cafés, or conducted phone interviews with buddies after their meetings. All conversations uncovered a similar set of shared qualities: there was an apparent need to find safe space. All buddies sought to find de-institutionalised arenas to stage their conversations,

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opting for cosy cafés or pubs instead of offices, meeting rooms or academic buildings. This need for safety was further articulated by the nature of the first conversations. Diving straight into the perceived murky depths of ethics was a daunting task and so most buddies circled around the subject, testing the water before revealing any opinion or stance. One buddy reflected on this preamble by saying “you have to expose yourself in many ways.” Once trust was determined – often prompted by the finding of shared experience or connection – conversations quickly became open and frank exchanges.

Some buddies found the experience to be a form of ‘therapy’ with one stating “when you talk about ethics it’s quite a negative conversation and difficult … but I could vent my inner conflicts.” The shared goal of ethics became a strong and explicit binder, overcoming issues of confidentiality and supporting a feeling of shared interest and ‘community,’ with a buddy explaining, “for me, the ethics conversation was of most value because of the sense of honesty I felt.”

These brief meetings and exchanges had a powerful outcome. It was very clear that they enabled buddies to co-evolve shared definitions of value for ethics in their practice, building their confidence for making the case to their organisations or academic communities. One academic reflected, “these conversations make justifying value easy.” Each buddy pairing’s definition had a clear relationship to their fellow buddy pairings, and, more than anything, the consensus was that of the need for more of the same. What buddies

learning, changing, growing

described was the need to continue and expand these types of interactions. On a basic level, our hypothesis felt right.

These sessions made clear that the nature of design practice is not wholly appropriate to standard ethical guidelines and support. What was problematic was the need for ethics to be in constant negotiation to remain relevant and meaningful. The inherent qualities of the practice of service design described by buddies was that of a formative process: a kind of ‘work-it-outas-we-go-along’ mentality that, although challenging, was inherently valuable. So rather than attempt to reflect and define the principles of a good and ethical interaction at the outset, there was a need to work to assess and define them in action. Practice can often be a shapeshifting peg, and fitting it into a square hole just will not work.

1. volunteer

5. meet

with buddy

2. create

profile

6. have

a

conversation

At the heart of our experiment at Uscreates was the apparent need to approach ethics as a community. One buddy described the need for ethics to be a “ground-up thing, based on discourse and dialogue in a community of practitioners.” The value of a shared discourse is clear, but this will only be possible if designers come together to examine ethics collaboratively and in an honest and open manner. We know that we are finding ourselves in increasingly fraught situations: no longer can ethics remain an afterthought; the risk is just too high. But beyond the risk is the reward that we can together find in actively seeking to examine and reflect on our ethical impact; the reward of doing what we do better and more responsibly.

To continue developing a shared discourse, Uscreates are dedicated to creating opportunities for designers and academics to come together.

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buddy selection process

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try out the tools

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use guide to prepare

report back to the network

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By Kerry Bodine

In any given service ecology there are multiple touchpoints that an organisation must design and manage. Each of these touchpoints requires an investment, and ideally that investment is aligned with the value that the touchpoint brings to both customers and the organisation. Unfortunately that isn’t always the case – and the call centre is one touchpoint where such misalignment is often painfully obvious.

Even with conservative estimates, it is easy to make the case that large call centres have customer influence on a par with, if not greater than, that of mass advertising campaigns.

(Assuming a call centre with 3,000 agents and an average of only 50 calls per agent per day, a company has the opportunity to make 1.05 million personal connections each week – and 54.6 million each year.)

In contrast to advertisements, the personal nature of call centre interactions has the potential to create intimate connections between customers and organisations. This, in turn, can help bolster an organisation’s brand image and delight people so much that they recommend the brand to friends. Great call centre experiences can also generate incremental revenue and (counterintuitively) reduce operating costs.

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Despite their potential value to both customers and organisations, call centres go largely ignored. Instead, companies make deeper investments in the Web and other sexy, of-themoment digital service interactions, like mobile applications and social networks. Not surprisingly, North American consumers report low satisfaction for conversations with call centre agents across multiple industries. They also rate interactions with agents lower than in-store experiences and interactions with nameless, faceless corporate websites.

Unable to See Call Centres’ True Value in the Service Ecology, Organisations Treat Them as Factories For the past several decades, call centre managers have focused on running call centres at peak

operational efficiency. And while efficiency in and of itself is a virtue, call centres have taken it to a dangerous extreme, ignoring the quality of interactions and treating agents like slave labour.

Some large call centres hold agents accountable for strict metrics like average speed to answer, average call handle time, talk time, idling time, non-production time and adherence to script, just to name a few. Other call centres literally make agents raise their hands in order to use the bathroom or only permit them to display one photo on their desks. In return for adhering to these draconian practices, agents are paid low wages. Not surprisingly, companies that take this approach count employee tenure in months, not years, and see employees quit to go elsewhere for raises of less than $1 per hour.

Cultural Change Is the Most Effective Tactic For Improving the Call Centre Customer Experience.

Service-focused companies like American Express, Esurance, and Zappos.com realise the value of call centre interactions for their businesses. To ensure that they deliver great phone experiences,

flickr.com/photos/memorymotel/491357743/sizes/o/in/photostream

Corporate Culture is Key to Improving Call Centre Services

forrester’s take

these companies have focused on creating a customer-centric call centre culture. This starts with hiring service-focused employees, often with no prior call-centre experience, and training agents on how create a strong connection with customers over the course of a call.

These conversation skills include: How to create an emotional connection American Express used to allocate roughly 70% of its training time for industry- and company-specific technical skills and 30% for ‘softer’ personal skills – but it has flipped that equation around. Today, 70% of agent training time focuses on skills such as actively listening to what the caller is saying and helping customers understand the value of their relationship with American Express.

For example, agents are trained on how to assess the caller’s mood and not just to rely on the demographic information that is in the caller’s customer profile. Another company we spoke to instructs agents to focus first on the caller’s need and only

verify the caller’s identity when that need is well understood or a key piece of information is needed.

What to say and how to say it Scripted conversations immediately feel fake to callers, but agents still need some guidance on what to say.

Esurance gathers agents into small group settings to role-play various situations, with one agent playing the customer and another playing the agent. With good humour, the agents find out how different conversations feel and suggest alternative language for each other. Zappos guides agents on what to say through one-onone coaching sessions in which a supervisor and agent each take a call and then the two discuss what the agent did well and what could be improved next time around, without relying on grading or scorecards.

Zappos also has a ‘Wow Library’ of recorded calls, which agents can tap into at any time to listen for new ideas on how to open a call or explain a company policy.

path, call centre executives must first separate agents who are truly passionate about providing great service from those who are merely ‘phoning it in’. Once the right agents are in place and understand how to create a connection with customers, they’ll need continual encouragement to deliver great customer experiences. To this end, call centre executives need to develop meaningful incentives such as informal recognition programs, bonuses tied to customer feedback and career progression plans.

•

Kerry Bodine, VP & Principal Analyst, Customer Experience at Forrester Research

Forrester’s Recommendations For companies that have been ignoring their call centre or that find themselves mired in a factory mindset, a cultural shift will mean big changes. To start down this

“Not surprisingly, North American consumers report low satisfaction for conversations with call centre agents across multiple industries.”

23

chapter # 2

Inspiring Learning

Strategies to Foster Learning with the Help of Service Design

By Patrik Frauzem and Ellen Simmons

Growing on its own: Energie-Labor 1.

Learning about Energy.

Enabling change.

Our 21st century world requires an unprecedented amount of energy. We depend on an everincreasing supply to improve – or simply maintain – the lifestyles we have become accustomed to. Governments around the world are pledging to reduce CO2 emissions and encourage sustainable energy usage. Global recognition, both politically and in the media, has brought the topics 2.

1. At

the end of module 1, each child receives a citizenship card for their city, an initiation that the class were very excited about. | 2. With the support of CSR-oriented companies, scientific experts, environmental organisations, and teachers, we empower children to be part of a better energy future.

26

of finite fossil fuels and climate change firmly into the public realm. We believe it is vital to introduce an awareness of these issues in schools at the earliest possible opportunity.

inspiring learning

To tackle the urgent need for change in our energy-use habits in a forwardthinking way, it is necessary to integrate a sensitivity to the topic into everyday life at an early age. Introducing knowledge about energy and sustainability into primary education will equip future generations with an awareness of the importance of sustainable energy production and use.

Energie-Labor is a complete learning unit that enables teachers to bring these topics into the classroom in an active and exciting way, and the service design thinking behind the Network for Environmental Education will ensure the natural development and growth of this project.

The Concept Physically, all the materials required to play Energie-Labor fit inside a cubeshaped box that unfolds into a large game board. This board represents a city for which the class will be responsible.

Week by week, the children build up their city, adding model houses and power plants, providing energy news for the citizens, and making important decisions about the energy production and use in their city.

We developed characters to accompany the modules of the game: each character relates to a real job from the energy industry. Every week the children take on the role of one character, and complete relevant activities that demonstrate the functions of the different professions, for example the politician. Forming four political parties, the class propose possible energy supplies for their city. Then the children vote for the winning concept and build models of the chosen power plants.

A team of service design students from KÜln International School of Design developed a concept to inspire enthusiasm for energy matters in primary school children. In 2010, the initial concept won 10,000 Euros from the German Ministry for Education and Research (BMBF) in the national Energy for Ideas’ competition. The prize money facilitated a four-week pilot phase that took place last autumn in three schools in Cologne, Germany. Following the huge success of this pilot, we are now in an evaluation and redevelopment phase, using service design methods to evolve the game.

Working Together During the initial development phase, we carried out a research activity with children from the T+Huis, a social centre for children in Eindhoven, Holland. Here we established the first contact with the target group, aiming to determine how receptive children between six and eleven years old are to the topic of energy.

We observed that the children were already aware of the big environmental issues and enjoyed being given the opportunity to take action in their local environment. Our findings backed up our belief that energy education in schools is both a viable and important concept, not only for building on their existing knowledge, but also for showing children that they are capable of making a difference.

The first drafts of the activities and tools for the pilot phase were tested in a co-design workshop with teachers. We extensively discussed the practicalities of implementing the game into the school system. For the second generation of the game, we have planned a series of workshops, during which the precise

27

By Patrik Frauzem and Ellen Simmons

“The key focus of Energie-Labor is to enable children to find their own approach, using active learning techniques to demonstrate to children that there is an opportunity for change.”

educational content of the game will be devised and evaluated.

Observation The planned improvements of the game were informed by direct observations of the pilot phase. Aside from assessing whether the activities worked in the classroom environment, the team also gained valuable insights into the way teachers and children interact: the way the teacher communicates the content is the key to the game’s success.

In the next generation of EnergieLabor, we will develop more adaptable learning materials, allowing teachers to be more creative and individualistic in the way they deliver the game, and also enabling them to reach a larger audience of children.

Continuous Development Behind the physical touchpoints of Energie-Labor lies system thinking and a service structure based not only on co-creation, but also on continuous processing, to ensure the best user experience possible. To facilitate the project’s development, we have established the Network for Environmental Education.

The Network invites both companies that put a strong focus on Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) and environmental organisations to support the project both financially and academically. With the help of such partners, we are realising the vision of an educational game that is continually being improved. The EnergieLabor team provides the framework and necessary tools, collates the input from our partners, and transforms it into a consistent educational game.

28

This system thinking is integral to the development of our service. It will happen in stages, having begun with an original concept development and testing in 2010. Currently, we are evaluating our original pilot phase and creating an improved set of learning tools for the school year 2011/12. In the next five years, as our network grows, we will endeavour to offer Energie-Labor to schools throughout Germany.

The Ripple Effect The key focus of Energie-Labor is to enable children to find their own approach, using active learning techniques to demonstrate to children that there is an opportunity for change. We explain a variety of careers in the realm of energy research, illustrating the many different ways people contribute to a brighter energy future. Throughout the game, the children are treated as experts and are given responsibility for their city – a blank canvas that they develop into their own city of the future. They develop an awareness of their own energy-use habits, and are empowered to make positive changes in their schools, their homes and their local communities.

In this respect, the educational reach of the game goes beyond the classroom and into everyday life, and the children apply topics covered in class to their home environment. During the pilot phase the children carried out an investigation of their homes, calculating their position on an ‘energy efficiency scale’ and designed energy saving posters to hang in their houses.

By establishing a dialogue between children, parents, neighbours and friends,

inspiring learning

Companies

Scientific Experts

Environmental Organisations

Energie-Labor

Patrik Frauzem, Project Leader, Energie-Labor, Cologne, Germany

Energie-Labor

Schools, Teachers and Children

Ellen Simmons, Project Leader, Energie-Labor, London, England

we can enable a better societal awareWith the support of CSR-oriented ness of the topic of energy, and ultimately companies, scientific experts, contribute to real societal change. This environmental organisations, and outward growth happens naturally, but is supported by the learning materials that we teachers, we empower children to provide and the network structure of which be part of a better energy future. the game is a part. Energie-Labor supports teachers in tackling complex themes in an in exciting way, and ultimately encourages children to find their own way to contribPlease follow our progress on our new ute to the future use of energy. website: www.energie-labor.de

29

By Sylvia Harris and Chelsea Mauldin

Better Services for the People Engaging Policy Makers in Improving Public-sector Service Delivery

Sylvia Harris, Principal, Citizen Research & Design (CitizenRD.com).

Sylvia is an information designer, dedicated to creating public-interest communications that serve the people.

Her firm, Citizen R&D, provides experience research and design planning services to the United States’ largest hospitals, universities, and civic agencies.

Chelsea Mauldin, Executive Director, Public Policy Lab. Chelsea is director of the Public Policy Lab (publicpolicylab.org), a New York City non-profit engaged in research and advocacy around policy and user-centred design. Mauldin Content, her consulting practice, offers communications strategy to public-sector clients.

30

Government agencies may perceive a need for better customer relations but often respond with isolated remedies. Their goals rarely include integrated and more engaging service delivery.

Designers have an opportunity to foster change, both within civic agencies and in society at large, by increasing awareness of the power of design to build public services that work.

More and more companies are evolving to provide their customers with usercentred products and services. Today it is easy, and even enjoyable, to track a package, bank online, or shop for a smartphone. In contrast, using our most vital public services can be timeconsuming and frustrating.

As citizens, we deserve public services that are efficient, effective and respectful. We need straightforward forms and publications, easy-to-use websites and call centres and clear signage and communications in public buildings. This is not just about making things look pretty: well-designed communications and services enhance understanding and increase citizen participation. They also lower cost, reduce errors and encourage compliance.

Most crucially, they deliver necessary assistance to our children, our veterans, our elders and other vulnerable populations.

We have had the opportunity to work with agencies in New York City and at the national level of the United States government and are happy to report that many in government service are working hard to be responsive to citizens' needs.

Unfortunately, we have also noticed several institutional barriers to designing satisfying services.

There Is No Design There Government services are insulated from the market pressures that drive private-sector firms to focus on customer satisfaction, and many public agencies have little motivation to improve user experience. While larger agencies may invest in user research, that research typically uses focus groups to elicit user preference: co-design exercises intended to involve users in the design of their own public services are rare.

In fact, ’user experience’ and service design are not typically identified as

“As citizens, we deserve public services that are efficient, effective and respectful.

We need straightforward forms and publications, easyto-use websites and call centres and clear signage and communications in public buildings.�

31

By Sylvia Harris and Chelsea Mauldin

legacy

policy designer

users

brand

Successful public-sector design initiatives must recognise that user needs are only one part of the picture: organisational needs, along with systems and production requirements, have an even greater impact than in most private-sector projects.

a focus for staff attention and effort.

In-house design staff may be limited and training and professional development in service design is typically non-existent.

Instead, many design responsibilities are delegated to professional contractors, and the highly trained service designers that craft great corporate service experiences are rarely included in federal and local governments’ contracting pool.

Inside the Box In addition to its lack of exposure to design, the public sector’s work culture is highly conservative. As a recent report issued by the non-profit Partnership for Public Service and design firm IDEO put it, “Rewards most often go to those who meet or exceed ‘safe’ expectations, not those who establish entirely new levels of expectations based on their ingenuity.

As a result, federal employees often find it better to stick to the standard operating procedures than to stick their necks out and try something new.”1 Efforts to introduce services that speak to user experiences and needs often run head-on into institutional roadblocks. Legislative requirements,

32

complex procurement rules, expensive (and outsourced) legacy systems, media scrutiny and lack of budget or internal procedures for speculative work all conspire to create an environment that is change-averse.

The Power Gap Finally, individual working groups within agencies are often quite isolated: the staff tasked with carrying out a given design project may have little or no contact with other groups handling different aspects of the same task, cannot authorise or implement work that deviates from accepted in-house practices and may have little authority to reach out to colleagues or even up their own reporting chain.

Design innovation therefore requires advance buy-in and authorisation from top-tier management: often political appointees with short tenures at the agency, limited familiarity with nut-andbolts operational issues and schedules booked months in advance.

Not Just Designers, But Educators The barriers described above are not insignificant. However, we have had

inspiring learning

some success in engaging policy makers in improving the delivery of public services. Because design thinking is unfamiliar to many government staffers, when designers join public-service improvement teams, they inadvertently perform the role of educator. Once at the table, designers have the opportunity to demonstrate the power of creative problem solving and to lay the intellectual groundwork for future

Engaging in-house administrative staff in design exercises and workshops introduces them to concepts of participatory design.

user-centred design processes. When a firm is choosing whom to assign to public-service teams, it is crucial to pick staff who are not just creative stars, but also comfortable in the more nuanced role of thought leader and educator.

On the very practical side we’ve also found it remarkably effective to engage in-house administrative staff in design exercises as a prelude to suggesting that their citizen-users participate in similar activities. Even asking staff to physically annotate paper mock-ups can have an electrifying effect compared to the more typical (and more passive) presentation of slides.

Negotiating Institutional Change Designers need to be flexible enough to negotiate and influence the requirements of a public-sector environment.

The simplest change – for instance, the redesign of a single form – may be constrained by congressional mandates, extensive internal review and legacy technology. As much as we might prefer to focus purely on a design solution, we have had better outcomes by assessing the back-end systems and the forces that influence the design environment, while trying to respect their motivation: those barriers are often put in place to safeguard public resources.

To be successful, the designer must become the architect of a contextappropriate change process, not just the creator of an excellent product or service. This, along with the utmost patience and equanimity, is a critical quality that can lead to success rather than frustration.

33

By Sylvia Harris and Chelsea Mauldin

after

before

A before-and-after visualisation of the pink slip for package redelivery that the U.S. Postal Service leaves at the door of millions of Americans. This simple and compelling speculative redesign impressed the Post Master, who asked his staff to get the ball rolling on changing this iconic service touchpoint.

Start at the Top While it may always be challenging to introduce design-driven improvements into government, the process is vastly easier if an organisation’s senior leadership mandates change from the top. We have had significant success in engaging civic leaders through quickly drawn-up examples of design-driven solutions for civic communications problems. Designers are averse to creating work on spec, but when it comes to the public sector, the impact of seeing a vastly improved service can create the necessary impetus to commit funds and staff toward actually developing innovative solutions.

34

Next Steps for Public-Sector Designers As much as we believe that design education plays a crucial role, it would be foolish to ignore the impact of the political climate on the uptake of innovative design processes. It is a welcome sign that the current U.S. administration has issued several challenges to improve access and transparency within federal agencies.

But on both the national and local level economic constraints will require designers to stretch their skills.

We must not only offer great design products, but also articulate how usercentred services can save money and make internal government processes

inspiring learning

more efficient, while improving public perception of government.

The design community should continue to educate receptive government staff: by conducting designthinking workshops, publishing articles in the press outlets that policy-makers read, and visualising great-but-feasible service redesigns, while also investing more to document the financial and experiential impact of service improvements. We need metrics that

speak to policy-makers. That way, when the political climate for investment is right, leaders will be familiar with the value of good design. At that point both political will and design skill may align, resulting in great services.

•

References 1

Partnership for Public Service and IDEO (2011).

"Innovation in Government" [Online]. Retrieved February 25, 2011, from http://www.ourpublicservice. org/OPS/publications/viewcontentdetails.php?id=155

» Studying service design at KISD really changed my understanding of design. « Adopting a user-centric approach to public transport in a project at KISD

www.kisd.de 35

By Julie McManus and Jonas Piet

Local Authorities: Tackling Engagement Challenges Together Camden Council is one of London’s 33 boroughs. It has been granted Beacon Status (now the Local Innovation Awards Scheme) for its positive engagement of older people in the development and delivery of services. Camden works closely with their local partners to continue engaging citizens, not organisations.

The Challenge Camden wanted to create a dialogue for sharing expertise between local authorities and other organisations.

They asked Engine to design and facilitate a series of workshops with these diverse practitioners from across the country, to be called the Beacon Learning Network. These workshops focused on ‘learning through doing’, with participants building on their collective experience to co-create new tools and methods for specific engagement challenges in their daily practice.

Each local authority has different concerns and priorities, such as digital inclusion or reaching older people with healthcare and other information. To solve these challenges, much can be learned from each other’s experiences, for example in communication to specific user groups. The methods and techniques developed in the workshops were also aimed at

36

other demographics, not just older citizens. One of the workshop participants has since applied co-designed planning on a project with disabled people, using existing knowledge and assets to the best effect: a necessary step in the current economic climate.

The Approach More than twenty local authorities and their partners went through a three-stage process, designed and facilitated by Engine. During three full-day workshops, participants reflected on their experience, chose priority areas for learning, developed practical tools and methods and ‘packaged’ them for sharing with colleagues.

The first workshop’s theme was Identify. Participants reflected on their expertise, areas of interest and challenges. This was supported with a mapping exercise, where participants used worksheets to visual-

ise their organisation’s capabilities at different levels, from service delivery and customer experience to organisational development. Within the group, 4 priority areas were chosen, including ‘Online Engagement’ and ‘Designing Services with Users’.

These areas were built upon in the second workshop, Make. Using simple templates such as timelines and segmentations, the priority areas chosen in the first workshop were unpicked and existing experience around them was discussed. The group working on Online Engagement created a segmentation of older people, based on motivation and abilities in using the internet. For each segment, the group formulated engagement strategies and specific advice to support different user types.

1.

In between the second and third workshop, the early tools were tested for usefulness and usability with a group of practitioners from outside the workshops.

inspiring learning

This was relayed to the third session, Share and Plan, where the early tools were refined for daily use and a series of engagement principles around the theme of engage with others as you wish to be engaged yourself were developed. Actionability in the workplace was also discussed, and instructions and examples of use were added.

In between the workshops, Camden Council populated and ran a blog as a repository of the work done so far and to keep workshop participants engaged over a period of 3 months. This served to keep the work fresh in people’s minds, encouraging feedback, reviews and ways of sharing information.

When the tools were completed, they were also added to the blog in a downloadable format.

The Result Beyond simply sharing knowledge, the workshops were aimed at

knowledge transfer, through the co-creation of practical tools and methods. Some participants already started applying these tools and methods before the end of the workshop series.

One of the methods is a way of creating user profiles. These could be used to target specific user groups, such as in projects about digital inclusion and to identify active and passive users and levels of ability.

This method includes a step-by-step process, templates and tips and empowers practitioners to gather user insight themselves, instead of having to bring in consultants.

There was really positive feedback around the ‘learning through doing’ nature of the sessions.

As participants had developed the tools and methods themselves, based on their daily practice and needs, they bonded more strongly with them and felt a clear sense of ownership.

To support sharing the results, Engine produced two publications in collaboration with Camden Council and the workshop participants. One presents

a compilation of the developed tools, including instructions and examples of use. The other presents the exercises and worksheets that enable other users to apply the workshop process to new engagement problems. Both publications are freely available from Camden’s website.

The collaborative process has been extremely encouraging for all involved. The workshop exercises provided a practical way to tackle engagement challenges together, and the tools and methods enable people to continue to do so. A path has been opened for future knowledge and communication channels between Local Councils and their partners.

•

Julie McManus, Knowledge Manager, Engine Service Design

Jonas Piet, Designer, Engine Service Design

1. Tackling

the challenge of engagement together | 2. Workshop participants sharing insights and expertise | 3.– 5. Tools developed in the workshop are published in a step-by-step guide that can be downloaded from the Camden Council blog 2.

5.

37

photo: Martin Koziel

chapter # 3

Service Design Education Looking Closer at the Developement of Service Design in Study and Academia

By Jürgen Faust

Using Service Design Education to Design University Services

Higher Education As a Future Working Environment for Service Designers

Prof. Dipl. Ing. Jürgen Faust is currently the VP for Academic Affairs and Research, as well as Dean at Macromedia University of Applied Sciences for media and communication in Munich where he teaches Design and Media Theory, and is working as an international consultant for the Istituto Europeo di Design (IED) in Milan, Italy.

40

Today, there are higher education institutions in various countries that offer service design programmes, but we rarely find that these institutions have taken service development seriously to the extent that they have redesigned their own university services. In many European countries (with the possible exception of the Anglo-Saxon and some northern European nations), the reason for this may be that academic institutions have been conventionally focused on research and some teaching, but not on serving its clients, the students.

In our experience, universities that focus on serving students as clients do so at the expense of their main objective: research.

Furthermore, the model of serving student clients is viewed with suspicion by those in academe.

It is, incidentally, even worse in many universities where high proportions of staff are involved in research. This can be also seen in Anglo-Saxon countries: quite frequently students even find that there is no help, and they are made to feel that they are disturbing those working in the research system, by the time and attention that they take up. Students have reported to us that they lose learning opportunities equivalent to a term or more puzzling out study plans, course requirements, or trying to get help in understanding the system. It is not too

provocative to call such a system, an ‘anti-service’ system, where non-existing services are swallowing up time and energy. We assert that such anti-service systems are ultimately uneconomic and costly in society.

But, more recently, we have seen the idea of client satisfaction beginning to take hold here in Europe. In 2004 – 2005, Laurea University of Applied Sciences in Finland was engaged in service design work for the University and has won several awards from the Finnish Higher Education Evaluation Council. In 2003 – 2004 and in 2006 – 2007, Laurea was appointed as a Centre of Excellence in Regional Impact. The Learning by Developing (LbD) learning model is a pedagogical innovation. It combines the three main tasks of universities of

fetching

online databases

clearance levels

access to materials

website

access to system

second hand media

suggest a purchase

library reference desk

security for virtual library

user generated content web2.0

opac

access to facility

security for facility security for materials

bazaar

renewing synchronization

borrowing returning

reservation request

search

phase

help & support

freshpages services

visitors

workshop, training, tutorials

help & training

user community & relationships

newsletter tool language tools publishing tool material locator & tracker

moodleplug-in

feedback

freshpages client

comments & rating citation tool software

disability & special issues

interoperability

writing programs

notifications

information

shop

temporary admittance

content check

news

availability guiding system system

1

phase

mhmk campus

about library

traditional library

merchandize materials

2

3

access & security

phase

delivery p2p lending

fines

facility

team prof. information exchange

assistance

stationary devices

architecture

reports, system logs

rights

seats

usability

movable devices

equipment & tools

maintenance environment, atmosphere, interior

eat & drink possibility

web apps

group collabora- alumni tion entertainment & experience apps, external plattforms messaging

staff

devices provided by the library

forum, blogs, wikis

stories & thoughts sharing space annotations & comments credit system, credit points

conference, workshops, training health & wellness equipment

working tables shelves

ils rooms

smokers solution storage

delivery

Service blueprint, Fresh pages library

online & offline

entertainment & experience

offline

credit system, credit points

online

41

By Jürgen Faust

applied sciences: professional education (learning), applied research and regional development (developing)1.

Another interesting example is the service blueprint available online from the University of Derby3. Derby has used service design research and methodologies in order to develop their services. But, these institutions are still exceptions, despite some movement in this direction. For instance, facultystudent ratios at universities in Germany have become a recent talking point, since German universities need to catch up with international standards to attract students from overseas. In addition, university management and efficient and adequate use of resources is an ongoing theme, since resources are limited.

“But how can customer satisfaction be achieved if academic institutions have not understood that a shift in their purpose /role is required, and have not realised the importance of keeping their customers satisfied in a globally competitive academic environment?”

Which academic institution is attracting the best and most promising faculty and students? This question gives services a pivotal role in the higher education differentiation strategy.

Looking at a higher education institution, we can identify two areas of services: First, the learning service, since teaching and support of learning is a service. This should not be confused with service learning, which is a strong movement in the US, where students

42

learn and get experience of working in public and private services, in order to prevent higher education institutions from becoming increasingly irrelevant to the real issues facing society. The increasing popularity of volunteerism has contributed to this. As a teaching method, it falls under the philosophy of experiential education 1.

Second, the services for learning in higher education: these are the support services for students that enable them to learn and use, for instance, library services, enrolment service, housing services, international services, IT support service, where students are able to get help with studying for a term abroad, etc.

It is appropriate, here, to differentiate between learning services and service for learning. At Macromedia Hochschule für Medien und Kommunikation (MHMK), where I currently work and teach, we have developed an MA programme in Media and Design, where students can focus on service design during their studies.

The educational setting for this masters course is based on a coaching culture.

Students work in teams, focusing on projects (from service, strategy, media and management environments) and faculty teaches professional topics to enhance knowledge in user-centred research, design research and help to develop the skills and methods in design and service design to successfully execute such design projects. In my capacity as both administrator and teaching professional, I was able to stimulate some thinking at the University and, as a result, we believe that we should strive

service design education

Fresh pages library homepage

to overcome the divide between teaching content and organisational behaviour.

Therefore, in one of the projects we carried out with the masters students, we worked on the design of a futureoriented service system for a media library. Supporting the faculty, students have carried out a term-long, extensive research project that has been captured and summarised in the ‘fresh pages library’ concept. The mission of the fresh pages library developed by the students is: To provide students, professors, and the faculty an open access to academic cross-media content in design, communication, management, technology and the related fields. The compilation of the customised services within one intuitive environment stimulates the use of information, creativity and personal and professional development. By connecting information and knowledge to professional working environments, social spaces and communities enrich the MHMK library campus life and the culture of MHMK throughout all campuses 4.

Students also developed five principles for the new library through

comprehensive customer-focused research. These principles are: 1. Integration, Networking and Internationalism: learn from the best and support the best 2. Customer-Centredness, ServiceOrientation 3. Increase Efficiency: one access-point for all Library services 4. Assure Quality 5. Sustainability: Product-ServiceSystem Approach and Product Lifecycle Management, from analogue to a digital work-flow Central to this concept is the re-imagining of a library as an information hub, the connection of the virtual and the physical space and accessibility to the library whenever and wherever the students need it. Within such a system, librarians are knowledge managers, extremely versatile in understanding contemporary media.

In order to understand the design criteria of the fresh pages library, the project team engaged in research, conducting many interviews with

43

By Jürgen Faust

ceo

ms. schmittfumian

board/ faculty members

chanceller gmbh company supplier

keep satisfied

software supplier

power

customer service

guest

external students

marketing/ pr

moodle administrator

monitor (minor effect)

other companies

prof. höhl

head of department

students council

ministry of education

keep informed

collaborative universities

merchandising interior architekt

students

librarian

publisher

interest

stakeholders, making numerous observations of students’ behaviour, and visiting other libraries. The first major step was the creation of a stakeholder map that showed that there were far more stakeholders than the project team would have at first believed. After the creation of this map, systematic interviews were conducted in order to create personas.

These personas represented five different user groups of the library. The personas included various students and faculty as well as ‘other users’ (staff and people from outside). During implementation, the project team was often surprised at the complexity of the project. Comprehensive research and benchmarking were carried out, as were swot analyses of the existing situation. Porter’s Five Forces analysis was conducted, and various design

44

Stakeholder chart

other campus

manage closely itdepartment

postservice / distribution

mr. faust

research methods were reviewed to find the most appropriate tools.

The workgroup came up with a comprehensive blueprint for the development of a library system that supports learning and researching. New features for the improved library have been developed: peer-to-peer lending, media fetching and delivery, fresh pages live feeds, and a fresh pages credit point system. For example, the fresh pages credit points enable individual students to collect credit points by performing actions on campus, such as research and carrying out work on campus with and for other students.

At first it seemed an unusual idea, but the University has already adjusted the curriculum to accommodate the new feature, collecting credit points by performing actions on campus. With the arrival of the Autumn 2011 cohort, students will also be able to undertake extracurricular activities to receive credit points. Therefore, the developed features will be implemented as well.

The workgroup developed a three-phase project plan.

In Autumn 2010, the first phases started and already the University can see an increase in library use. The second and third phase will be implemented over the next few years. But because of the improvements already evident from the increased level of service that the fresh pages library provides, the entire university service system will

now be evaluated and redesigned. The process and results will be summarised in a masters thesis on university service systems. This project will be accompanied by smaller service design projects, focusing on sub-systems, such as the university IT service system.

And finally, looking at the result and the response from other libraries to this first project, we are confident in stating that, within the higher education field, there will be much more work for service designers in the years to come.

•

References Book 1 Dan W. Butin, Service-Learning in Theory and Practice: The Future of Community Engagement in Higher Education, Palgrave Macmillan, 2010 Internet resource 2 Maarit Fränti, Developing Laurea’s Services in Service Innovation and Design, Publisher: Laurea University of Applied Sciences /Laurea Communications, 2007, last viewed 16. Feb. 2011, http://www.service-design.de/ fileadmin/pdf/publikationen/laurea_SID_ 2007.pdf 3 Service Blueprint, University of Derby, last Accessed 18 Feb, 2011, http://www.derby.ac.uk/experience/JISCenrolment-project Unpublished Masters Project 4 Eva Hoke, Irina Tsolova, Philip Marzoch, Till Neumann, Verena Hajek, Usama Abusa'ada in Fresh Pages Library, MHMK Library, Project of the Masterclass Media and Design. MHMK-Munich, 2010

master in service & experience design WHERE Milan DURATION 12 months INFORMATION Phone +39 02 424140 01 / 25 infoservice@domusacademy.it www.domusacademy.com

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By Ariel Guersenzvaig

Teaching Service Design to Design Students Course Highlights and Conflicts

Service Design and Innovation (SDI) is a mandatory studio course for all 4th year students (ca. 130) at the ELISAVA School of Design. In this project-oriented course, 4th year students from all pathways (graphic and interaction design, product design and interior and furniture design) work together in multidisciplinary teams of 3 or 4 members. Students can draw upon knowledge gained during earlier courses, such as sociology, anthropology, experience prototyping, user and interaction modelling and design management.

Course Objectives 1. To introduce students to designdriven innovation • To enable students to build skills and knowledge designing for intangibles, services, and experiences • To provide students with a set of techniques which will enable them to discover new user needs and business opportunities, as well as aid them in conceptualisation and prototyping of new services • To enable students to work together and find common ground across different design disciplines Assignments and Collaboration with Companies and Institutions In recent years, institutions and companies have participated in this course

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by playing the role of a real client, providing business goals, constraints and the context of an institutional organisation. Having a real client gives the assignment extra credibility, something that motivates the students even more.

In 2008 – 2009, la Caixa collaborated with us on this project.

With its headquarters in Barcelona, la Caixa is Europe’s largest savings bank. The assignment was to envision, conceptualise, and prototype an innovative financial service for people in the age range 14 – 25.

In 2009 – 2010, we partnered with 22@Barcelona, a project created

by Barcelona City Council in order to foster social, urban and economic innovation in the 22@ district, the biggest ongoing development project

within the city. The assignment was to develop services that encouraged social participation in the 22@ district, in order to improve the social and business cohesion while increasing the quality of life and work.

In 2010 – 2011, we were supported by experts from the Generalitat of Catalonia, the highest government body of the autonomous community of Catalonia. The topic was active ageing and the assignment was to conceptualise and define services that foster the social inclusion of the elderly and increase their mental and physical activity.

Process and Methods The studio activities are structured around a four-stage design process: 1. Discover, 2. Generate, 3. Evaluate 4. Communicate, with frequent feedback loops and iterative returns to earlier stages. The process usually starts with the Discovery phase, by learning about the institution, understanding the brief, and defining stakeholders. After the students have defined an initial problem statement or design challenge, using mind maps and visual thinking tools, they define a user research plan for interviewing and observing users in context.

registration

media contact

grandparents + grandchildren

through old or new media

wii

send welcome pack

put your grandparents on the game posa l'avi en joc

welcome pack

online gaming

escudé/lisak/lopez/tarradellas

create user and team profiles.

They conduct user research and, after sufficient initial data is gathered, they move to data analysis, modelling users through personas and scenarios and by mapping the user’s mental models. They move to concept generation, selection and refinement, while still carrying out interviews and validating their concepts and early prototypes with users. As the generation and evaluation stages usually overlap, the evaluation activities are freely planned during the allotted weeks. The process concludes with final versions of a service blueprint and a video presentation describing the user experience and the value proposition.

offline event (ie bowling)

review rankings and lists.

meet rival teams through social media.

all teams participate, regardless their skills de-virtualise the online game and make it tangible

players train for the offline event (ie bownling)

Conflicts in Problem Finding The SDI course confronts the students with the first complex project, in which they have to do as much problem finding as problem solving.

In the first three years of their education, students have developed strong problem-solving skills and begin to master a solution-driven approach to design. Nonetheless, according to the course teachers, students seem to be less proficient at defining and framing the problem. This difficulty manifests itself during the Discovery and the Generation stage.

In the Discovery Stage When they detect a promising design opportunity, it is very hard for the

great opportunity to meet the people they have been playing against and foster these relationships

games and clasification live scores and highlights

System map for New Sports Generation, one of the Active Aging projects in which grandparents and grandchildren played together in a city wide sports contest.

students not to jump to envisioning a (final) solution right away. By asking students “What need is being solved by this solution?” or “What do you want to accomplish with this solution?” we encourage them to slow down and take time to reflect and explore hidden areas of opportunity, in order to better define the design problem.

47

By Ariel Guersenzvaig

Registration flyer for New Sports Generation

In this way, they learn that solution concepts are also a means of increasing their understanding of the problem.

In the Generation Stage When students generate a first (abstract) solution, they tend to see it as an early stage of a final solution.

Even though they are encouraged to do so, they resist exploring parallel approaches to a solution. Some teams do realise, though, that these initial solutions would be better used to learn more about the problem, used as triggers for new solutions and that they need not be seen as early stages of the final solution itself. The teams that make this step produce the best overall results.

In the Evaluation Stage As I mentioned earlier, there is overlap between the Generation and the Evaluation stages. We have spotted two distinct approaches in evaluating: some teams evaluated raw concepts or prototypes as soon as they could in order to get new inputs;

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they designed a little and evaluated a little. Other teams waited until they sensed the concept was finished and could not be further improved by the team itself: they designed first and evaluated later. The teams that chose the first approach, with several evaluation cycles, welcomed the external input and seemed to have little difficulty adjusting or revising their concepts. The teams that evaluated less frequently were often dismayed when they detected flaws in their designs during evaluation.

Informal interviews with students confirm these findings, which need to be researched further.

•

Ariel Guersenzvaig is a lecturer and area coordinator at ELISAVA School of Design in Barcelona (Pompeu Fabra University).

He is a Ph.D. candidate at the Universitat de Barcelona and has a degree in Information Management. He also works as an independent design consultant and is a proficient surfer.

to u b u y ch onl point ine

Touchpoint 1#1 – “What is Service Design?” The first issue of Touchpoint explores the basics of service design and aimes at creating a forum for discussion amongst service design practitioners. 200 µ 265 mm, 60 pages, 12,80 ¤.

Touch po ioural int 2#1 – “ S C retica hange” giv ervice desig l mod e els an s an insigh n and Beh with av d prac t be tical p view of th 104 p havioural eo r ages, 12,80 change. 20 ojects deali ¤. n 0 µ 265 m g m,

and Service Design” Touchpoint 1#2 – “Health ial and economic soc al, explores the individu and the potential of relevance of health systems and reinvent health service design to redesign , 126 pages, 12,80 ¤. services. 200 µ 265 mm

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purchase touchpoint – the journal of service design – online Touchpoint, the SDN Service Design Journal, was launched in May 2009 and is the first Journal on service design worldwide. Each issue focusses on one topic and features news and trends, interviews, insightful discussions and case studies. All issues of Touchpoint are available on the SDN website. To purchase single issues or an annual suscription of three issues visit www.service-design-network.org/tp-catalog

Touchpoint 1#3 – “Bey ond vites you to dive into th Basics” ine discussion and reflect ions of th s e se national Se rvice Desig cond intern Conferen in October ce 20 116 pages, 12 09. 200 µ 265 mm , ,80 ¤.

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0 12,8 es, pag mm, 104

By Andy Polaine

Late to the Party?

The Challenges and Opportunities Facing Service Design Education

Service design is relatively late to the party as a part of higher education. It is encouraging to see a growth in the number of courses, but it is also noticeable that service design has no clear home in academia.

The practice can be found in areas ranging from integrated design, management, interaction and product design, marketing, information science and knowledge management courses, as well as complete programs devoted to it.

Although service design has existed for some time as a coherent discipline, for the institutions where it is now being taught, it is still a very new addition and a slightly strange beast.This presents both challenges and opportunities for academic institutions, their faculty and the students.

On the one hand, service design is less encumbered by tradition: there are open vistas to explore as a growing commercial and public sector discovers the need for graduates with these thinking skills. Service design is inherently cross-disciplinary in nature and offers the opportunity to deliver on the rhetoric of transand cross-disciplinary projects and activities.

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On the other hand, service design is a many-sided peg that is trying to fit in a square hole.

“Most higher education institutions that teach design today have a history of art and design as disciplines defined by craft practice within the academy. ” Sculptors sculpted, painters painted, product designers made objects in the workshops and graphic designers worked with symbols.

Despite the world of flux in which we now live, not a great deal has changed in design institutions.

There have been exceptions, of course, but as recently as 20 years ago, art and design studio courses were divided in this manner. Twenty years sounds like a long time to a 20 year-old just entering college,

but it is well within institutional memory and it is into these cultures and structures that service design is trying to insert itself. Academia moves achingly slowly: I know of at least one design course in another institution called ‘Design and Computers’, a title that seems rather redundant in today’s digital age.

Yet, just changing the course name requires at least a six month process and the approval of no fewer than four committees.

Having moved from teaching interaction design for several years, my own experiences of teaching service design within the Hochschule Luzern’s MA Design Major of Product Design and Management and the on the BA Design Management International have required re-thinking my approach.

It is tricky to teach the ‘networked mindset’ required for service design when abstracted from projects. It can become too easy to fetishise methods such as blueprinting or ethnographic research. They are important, of course, but the integration and synthesis process really only happens via learning-by-doing.

This is especially an issue for those

service design education

students coming from product-assolution undergraduate training.

Additionally, the requirements and logistics of teaching in sequential weeks and semesters means that the process is broken down into a research, insights/synthesis, concept and prototyping sequence that makes sense on paper, but belies the reality of the more parallel, iterative process involved in conceiving a service proposition. It has been revealing that students asked to research, conceive, sketch and prototype projects in short one-tofive day workshops often develop more complete propositions than they do in the drawn-out structure of semesters. My guess is that shorter bursts of activity forces them to holistically focus their conception of the complete project while the shorter timescale allows them to keep various design criteria simultaneously active in their minds.

As with any other service, it is important to consider to what extent existing structures influence attempts at innovation and change.

In order to ‘walk our talk’, we are faced with the challenge of preaching the value of integrated, coherent service experiences and inclusive,

“In order to ‘walk our talk’, we are faced with the challenge of preaching the value of integrated, coherent service experiences and inclusive, co-designed organisational cultures to students studying in environments that are often cobbled together out of used – and sometimes broken – parts and dominated by excessive top-down bureaucracy.” co-designed organisational cultures to students studying in environments that are often cobbled together out of used – and sometimes broken – parts and dominated by excessive top-down bureaucracy.

The positive conclusion in all of this is that service design’s current failure to fit neatly into existing discipline boxes creates an opportunity Arguably, service design is a practice more than a job description, in much the same way that various film production roles and activities are understood under the umbrella term ‘filmmaking’. Many commercial service design studios have staff from a range of backgrounds engaged in practicing service design. The opportunity for education is that, seen as a practice, service design can be the vehicle for an entire set of trans-disciplinary projects. These can be a way forward for departments and schools to dismantle their partitions and work together on the wicked

problems that are the domain of no one discipline, but the responsibility of us all to tackle.

But, students and faculty need to first turn their gaze to the institutions themselves: most of them are desperately in need of a 360º service design overhaul in order to help faculty and their students face the challenges of education in the 21st century. As Ghandi said, “be the change you want to see”.

•

Dr. Andy Polaine is Lecturer and Research Fellow in Service Design at the Lucerne School of Art and Design in Switzerland. He is co-writing a book on service design for Rosenfeld Media along with live|work co-founders, Ben Reason and Lavrans Løvlie.

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#*&%*$&/#& man i'm late. i wonder which building i'm going to?

oh no, more people in the way!

52

where to park?

By Johan Blomkvist, Stefan Holmlid, Fabian Segelstrรถm

Prototyping a Service Design Curriculum

Integrating Current Research in Teaching

This article describes how we developed a new service design curriculum and integrated current research into the courses. We did this by prototyping the service design curriculum together with our design masters students. The new curriculum is aimed at students who already have basic design skills and focuses on helping the students to reflect on the new challenges that service design brings compared to other design disciplines.

Current research into the tools and techniques of service design has been integrated into the curriculum as a catalyst for the content of the courses given according to the curriculum.

Why We Needed a New Curriculum Our curriculum from 2005 was a projectbased curriculum, run as two courses: one in a design studio format and one with an information and communication technologies (ICT) perspective. The ICT course was withdrawn after a few years.

The curriculum and the courses were tightly interwoven with current research projects. In 2009, we decided to change the curriculum, with the aim of finishing the implementation of the curriculum in spring semester 2012. The rationale was twofold: 1. To restructure and modernise the service design studio course from 2005 2. To prepare the curriculum for growth over time, from courses with fewer than 10 students to those with more than 30 students

The outcome was a curriculum aimed at introducing service design to students who already have basic design skills, using a curriculum that can be easily adapted to fit class size and the design background of the students.

How We Did It We began development by investigating various perspectives on service design in relation to the amount of design knowledge the students have when they take the service design course. All service design courses currently given at Linkรถping University are held at a masters level. Knowing which programmes students were coming from, we were able to assume that the students had basic design skills when starting the course. Therefore, the focus of teaching

Johan Blomkvist has a cognitive science background with a design twist, and is currently working on his Ph.D thesis at Linkรถping University.

Stefan Holmlid is associate professor at Linkรถping University.

He co-founded the Service Design Network and the Service Design and Service Innovation Conference.

Fabian Segelstrรถm is a PhD student focusing on stakeholder involvement in service design and how insights thereof are visualized.

53

By Johan Blomkvist, Stefan Holmlid, Fabian Segelström

would be the specific tools and techniques used within service design. Before starting the design segment, the students were introduced to the concept of service and the specific challenges of designing for services.

Furthermore, we made the strategic decision to base the course on current developments in design research2. Research has identified visualisations of services4 and service prototyping1 as areas in which the nature of services lead to new challenges compared to the traditional design fields.

01.

02.

visualisations. To put visualisations into context with the help of current research, students were introduced to the model by Diana, Pacenti & Tassi3 to help them organise their thinking. Furthermore, they were introduced to the most common visualisation techniques. The students were then encouraged to explore the different techniques and choose the ones most suitable for their needs.

As students were assumed to already possess basic design skills such as ideation, we encouraged them to spend as little time as possible on finding The Idea, but rather to pick one that they instinctively believed in.

The First Curriculum Draft Students then immediately started with prototyping activities. The last The first draft of the curriculum was stage of the design process focused heavily on the theoretical importance prototyped during the spring of 2010 and was evaluated together with the students. of prototyping holistic representations of services. The students were inThe students were given redesign projects troduced to a list of perspectives from which prototyping and prototypes have been discussed in previous design literature. These perspectives related to different areas of the campus, with lesson plans that focused on specific were then used to facilitate their understanding of service prototyping challenges and to support communication around the features of their activities particular to service design. prototypes. The prototypes were created using physical, virtual, graphiThe different parts of the service design process were introduced to the students in cal and interactive components, thus developing the skills of the students in a diversity of domains. The new curriculum was well received by the a segmented way. students in general, but some changes were suggested.

The activities – or phases of the service design process – that the students were expected to learn about were stakeScaling up: The Second Curriculum Draft holder research, visualising research data, The second iteration of the curriculum was adapted, based on student representing ideas on a theoretical level feedback and our own evaluations. Another challenge for the second and prototyping ideas. The students all had round was that we developed it for a group of 33 design engineers in a experience in an ethnographic approach more traditional classroom environment. to design research, so the importance of Based on the feedback from the previous year, we changed the design identifying stakeholders and service flows challenge to feel less segmented and to focus on a holistic designing experiwere highlighted in this segment. ence. This changed the curriculum in a number of ways: in the initial stage, Halfway through the research students were given more freedom in choosing the scope of their project phase, the students were introduced to and asked to identify the problem area they wanted to work with.

54

service design education A product prototype aimed at improving a touchpoint of the service experience at a restaurant on campus | 02. Photos visualising research data collected during a design probe study 01.

To let the students focus on visualisation techniques throughout their projects rather than in one segment, we specified which types of techniques students were to use in the different stages of the course.

Various types of system and actor maps were used after the stakeholder research, whereas customer journeys and blueprints were used in the ideation phase. Finally, in the prototyping phase, students were instructed to storyboard their ideas before creating video prototypes.

Based on feedback from the first iteration, the ideation phase was extended in this course to highlight a more holistic design process. The students spent more time developing their service ideas by transforming insights from research into configurations of networks of value creation.

Insights from the Second Draft As of this writing, we are in the final weeks of the course for Spring 2011, but some changes for the next iteration of the curriculum have already been identified.

Primarily, we observed that, when given the opportunity to choose what to design in a given context, the students mostly preferred to develop new services rather than to design improvements to existing services. This had two consequences: 1. Students struggled with identifying all stakeholders of the new service models and had difficulty finding ways of visualising their insights from the stakeholder research

2. The students might get the wrong idea of service design practice. Most commercial projects are aimed primarily at improving existing services rather than generating new service ideas For these two reasons, courses in the next iteration of the curriculum will focus on course activities where students consider existing services as their starting point. We will emphasise that idea generation should be made with respect to improvements, rather than radical innovation. We recommend that skills on improving existing services are seen as a higher priority than skills for coming up with new ones for students, in order to align learning with their future role.

How We Use the Curriculum During spring 2011, the curriculum has supported us in the development and performance of a solid, pluralistic and multi-disciplinary studio course in service design for masters students in Design, and a more traditionally structured course for Design Engineering students. It has also been used to develop a micro-module in service design as part of a course on Industrial Service Development for students in industrial engineering. We are starting to develop the contents of a PhD course in service design, and will also use it for the module developed and given with the Business & Design lab in Gothenburg later in 2011.

•

References 1 Blomkvist, J. (2011). Conceptualising Prototypes in Service Design. Linköping, Sweden: Linköping University.

2 Blomkvist, J., Holmlid, S., & Segelström, F. (2010).

This is Service Design Research. In M. Stickdorn, & J. Schneider (Eds.), This is Service Design Thinking (pp.

308-315). Amsterdam, Netherlands: BIS Publishers.

Diana, C., Pacenti, E., & Tassi, R. (2009). Visualtiles Communication tools for (service) design. First Nordic Conference on Service Design and Service Innovation.

Oslo, Norway.

4 Segelström, F. (2010). Visualisations in Service Design.

Linköping, Sweden: Linköping University.

3

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By Jeff Howard

Teaching

Co-Design Service designers embrace co-design for political, ethical and pragmatic reasons, but the theory behind how and why these methods work is largely unfocused.

Over the past decade, individual firms have relied on intuition and experience to shape these engagements, but, despite their success, the community lacks a coherent model of codesign to evangelize for an emerging generation of designers.

Students from the vanguard of today's service design programs are often drawn from the ranks of older disciplines such as visual design or industrial design, disciplines that do not have a strong participatory tradition.

“The writings of twentieth century visionaries such as Paul Rand or Henry Dreyfuss routinely dismissed the perspective of non-designers, mocking their uninformed opinions and promoting a culture of design authority.”

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This cultural baggage makes co-design difficult to teach and difficult to learn, but educators can offset this perspective with case studies and other readings that demonstrate participatory values.

From the beginning, projects should emphasize the role of non-designers as collaborators rather than subjects.

The successful introduction of user-centered principles to design curricula over the past twenty years offers a potential model for codesign.

But even when these values are accepted, student design teams face an important practical challenge: “there is rarely enough time or budget for sustained participatory engagements in the wild. Even the requirements for traditional ethnography can be a challenge.”

When schools depend on the charity of volunteers for their research efforts, it's more than a little daunting to run a full participatory workshop.

Programs that expose students to industry-sponsored courses face a

similar problem. Client involvement tends to follow an evaluative framework rather than the sustained engagement that co-design requires.

To find true co-design partners, the academic community must look inward. By focusing on projects that involve the student body, fledgling designers can explore in-depth collaboration rather than token efforts on the part of project sponsors. It goes against orthodox philosophy, but for co-design to take root, the students themselves are a primary source for subject-matter expertise, if only for reasons of availability. This means focusing on services at the heart of student life, such as registration or campus health services. More promising are student-provided services such as tutoring or ride-sharing.

Collaborating across departments and recruiting students into the program from a variety of disciplines can help to balance the equation.

Mock workshops are an important part of any co-design curriculum. Brief engagements divorced from larger projects provide students with an opportunity to experiment with facilitation techniques and learn by trial and error before working with clients. These efforts can gradu-

service design education

ally build into larger projects over the course of the term. Initiatives that stretch over multiple terms or across classes offer an even better environment for developing the relationships that are at the heart of co-design.

The search for a teachable co-design model at the academic level requires some creativity. In the absence of a strong collaborative framework there are three potential sources for inspiration: participatory design, organizational change, and architectural charrettes.

Research into participatory design in the Scandinavian tradition stretches back to the 1960s and offers a rich assortment of insights regarding both the tactical and ethical components of co-design. But despite this community's rich history, their findings tend to be fragmented across an array of academic papers with few guideposts. This can make the research a bit daunting for the uninitiated, though recent conferences have begun to reach out to service designers with new connections.

The world of organisational change offers a more structured per-

“From the beginning, through books and workshops projects should and offer an accessible model emphasize the role for bridging the gap between of non-designers as co-design and traditional design cultures. collaborators spective, Teaching co-design at the rather than particularly university level demands a shift when it comes in values and a search for new subjects.” to the details of facilitating group workshops. The authors of competing techniques such as Future Search, Appreciative Inquiry, and Open Space Technology evangelize their theories with fervor and promote key principles. Workshops revolve around collaborative activities such as mind mapping and other visualisation techinques that are common in the world of design and provide a rough template for understanding the mechanics of participation in both large and small groups.

The most promising avenue for co-design practice comes from architecture and urban planning.

Over the past fifty years, the architectural community has developed a robust approach to participatory design charrettes that incorporate members of the community as active co-creators. The details of these techniques are widely available

techniques. In the absence of a coherent model for participation, the only alternative is to draw from a range of sources, spanning disciplines and reconciling perspectives from academia and industry. Working together, the community can help the designers of tomorrow to embrace the challenges of co-design.

•

Jeff Howard edits the popular weblog Design for Service, a wide-ranging collection of research, patterns and observation focused on service design.

He holds a Masters of Design in Interaction Design from Carnegie Mellon University and a BFA in Graphic Design from Missouri State University. He currently works as a designer and researcher in San Francisco.

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for Better Services for Better Lives

Masters Path to Train Service Design Professionals

Elena Pacenti Director, Masters in Service Design, Domus Academy

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This article describes the learning-by-doing approach adopted to teach service design at a postgraduate level by the Italian design school, Domus Academy. It contextualises the discourse about service design within the Italian design approach and background, as well as with respect to the demand for such a profession by service companies. It calls for the creation of a new generation of service design professionals who will lead the transformation of the service industry towards humanised and innovative service models.

service design education

Masters course reception at Domus Academy

“After all, human beings are at the heart of service design”. With this statement, Ezio Manzini closed the service design convention that took place in Milan on February 15, 2011. The conference gathered together the most interesting Italian experiences and case studies on service design1. It represented an opportunity to present projects from both service industries and design studios and to discuss what seems to be one of the most promising design disciplines for the near future.

I wondered many times what attracted me so strongly towards this topic, both as an undergraduate and then during my PhD. At the time, service design wasn’t much more than a visionary intuition that Manzini shared with a few others in Europe, like Michael Erlhoff in Cologne, about the possibility of applying design to the service sector. I believe that the most interesting aspect of Italian design in general is its understanding of the central role that human beings play in the design process and its ambition to contribute to the improvement of the world we live in.

In his autobiography, Ettore Sottsass2 writes: “for some Italian architects and designers, the idea of design for industry represents the wider topic of a political vision. That vision includes giving shape to the hope that society had, on the one hand, to use the

strength of the new barbarism [author’s note: industrialisation], and on the other hand to manage it and improve people’s lives with a more responsible and aware design of the environment that we create, and of the objects and tools that invade it. (…) That hope was the fantastic element that pushed Italian design to leave an indelible imprint on the world”.

For those who share such a humanistic approach, the reason for working in the field of design is represented by the desire to build micro and macro visions of potential worlds, better than the one we are currently living in. Thanks to this desire, design arose naturally from the field of industrial products, finally reaching advanced spheres of production, such as the nowpervasive ones of digital technology and services.

It has been 15 years since the first pioneering research on the design of services was carried out. Since then, service design has been integrated in the curricula of several design- and business schools around the world. In some countries, it has even become a professional practice. The service design community, including practitioners and researchers, keeps sharing experiences and insights, based on an established and consolidated body of knowledge and identified tools. Today, many networks, online communities, publications,

59

By Elena Pacenti

dedicated conferences, blogs and other cultural initiatives have been created.

For this very reason, the time seems ripe to offer a dedicated, advanced education program addressed at designers and professionals wanting to focus their career within the domain of services.

Making the decision to promote the topic of service design in the world of post-graduate education, is not an easy one. Only a few schools currently offer post-graduate programs entirely dedicated to service design. Participants in such programs share the challenges and risks that come when breaking new ground.

In fact, service design currently represents an extraordinary opportunity to innovate in the most important industry in the advanced economies. It represents an almost unlimited field of opportunity that touches many different sectors, both private and public, in all functions of our daily life and in the most critical aspects of our existence, such as assistance and care services.

Despite the fact that this discipline has seen a rapid expansion in the past few years, the service design industry, dominated by an organisational and managerial culture, is not quite ready for new design professionals. Service design is currently walking the route that ‘traditional’ design likely went through when, from industrial product, it shifted towards strategy.

Designing services means acting upon the organisation and culture of a company; it means touching upon aspects of identity and human resources management and it thus is an intrinsically strategic design project.

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The structure and model of the Masters course

The strength and the heart of service design is the ability to understand and improve the experience of people and the quality of relations between the people involved in the service. This means not only acting upon places, on tangible and visible aspects and upon the experiential dimension, it also means, in most cases, actively working on the organisation.

This is why, in my vision, a postgraduate program should train professionals to work in the service industry and promote innovation by offering them conceptual, interpretative, and operational tools, together with the opportunity to really experience and apply such approaches and methods in real-world cases.

The design-based learning approach is based not only on an interdisciplinary knowledge base, but also on design practice in real contexts and in close relationship with companies.

Design-based learning is made possible through the involvement of service companies that represent the realitycheck for the design challenges that participants will deal with.

Service design education at a postgraduate level should be strongly based on methodological aspects and on a solid interdisciplinary approach: we should aim to foster the active dialogue between design culture on the one hand, and management and marketing disciplines on the other, as

service design education

knowledge-base learning (lectures, case-studies, testimonies)

design-base learning (workshops)

individual challenge (project thesis)

well as between engineering and human sciences.

Service design as a profession can be applied to the most varied of experiences and in very diverse contexts: from private industries, where service design confronts itself with business and market topics, to social sectors, including communitarian initiatives and social entrepreneurship, where service design faces issues such as welfare and economy modelling innovation.

In all instances, the impact and the contribution of a design-driven approach can vary significantly. This is why we strongly believe that a good, highereducation program focusing on service design should include the opportunity to take part in design workshops that deal with a wide variety of design issues, as well as in different service sectors and typologies, from finance to medical services, hospitality to entertainment, to services for citizens, etc.

Service-design professionals have to be ready to work for, and in, service companies to promote human-driven innovation, to design better environments and relationships, to create platforms that

will enable new and unusual relationships and to discover and manage the aesthetic dimension of interactions.

The service designers we want to prepare have to be strong enough to promote a visionary and human-centred approach when designing services.

However, they should be humble, thoughtful and sensitive in order to understand and gauge the results in relation to the specific contexts.

Maybe just a few of them will be lucky enough to contribute, during their professional careers, to the design of completely new services that will change welfare models and behaviour, and will introduce alternative and sustainable models. But they all will be able to contribute to the humanising of existing services. In the end, this is the real strength and appeal of this adventure: to think about providing new generations of designers with the tools and the perspective to improve the services that permeate our lives; to give back to design the dream that it can, in fact, contribute to improving our world.

•

References 1 Convention promoted by ADI and Politecnico di Milano, with the contribution of Domus Academy, Fondazione Housing Sociale, FDVLAB – Laboratori Fabbrica del Vapore Nova24 – Il Sole24ore on the occasion of the inclusion of service design amongst the categories for the ADI’s Index - Compasso d’Oro selection.

2 Sottsass, E. (2010) “Scritto di notte”. Milan, Adelphi

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By Lara Penin

A Critical Approach to Service Design Education: Building an Undergraduate Learning Path at Parsons School of Design Strategies

Lara Penin, assistant professor, School of Design Strategies, Parsons The New School for Design, coordinator of the Area of Study of Service Design, founding member of Parsons DESIS Lab

This article presents the curricular structure of the Service Design Area of Study at Parsons School of Design Strategies, its pilots and current range of courses. The course examples evidence the socially driven approach adopted, defining our vision of teaching service design. We will argue that creating an area of study implies, first and foremost, defining a cultural project and, to do so, it is essential to nurture a professional and scientific community to which both faculty and students can refer and gauge their work against. We will exemplify how the support of research is essential in supporting innovative teaching by describing the work being done by Parsons DESIS Lab to support the Service Design Area of Study.

Designing a Socially Engaged Course Offering Educating for services is part of Parsons School of Design Strategies mission: “To advance innovative approaches to design, art and business education specifically in the context of cities, services and urban ecosystems”1. Parsons is part of The New School, “a legendary progressive university” with a declared mission to “bring actual, positive change to the world.”

This original socially engaged DNA of Parsons and The New School has set the tone for the promotion of service design in our curriculum, in particular, determining social innovation as a design

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direction for designing services. The Area of Study in Service Design began to be designed as part of the Integrated Design program in 2009 and started off with one pilot course in Fall 2009, titled Next_F in reference to the partner organisation, The Fortune Society, a distinguished, not-forprofit organisation offering reintegration services to formerly incarcerated people2.

The brief defined with The Fortune Society was to design new services or redesign existing ones to impact the overall experience of their clients by enhancing their ‘sense of community’, in particular at the beginning of the client’s engagement with the organisation, to

service design education

service design studios foundation (1st year)

sophomore (2nd year)

studio

Tools for Interaction (multidisciplinar studio)

studio

Services and the Self

senior (4th year)

junior (3rd year)

studio

Services and the Household

studio

Services and the City

service design courses and other courses multi-disciplinary

service design specific

colloq

collab

lab

theoretical courses Service Design Concepts Service Experiences ...

studios in partnership with external organization

skill-building courses

Next F/ Urban Services (reintegration services) ...

enable clients to reconnect with their original perception of community rather than an institution.

The course was therefore crafted as a participatory process, focusing on the human quality of the experience of Fortune’s clients and staff. To do that, several iterations with clients and staff were promoted and have directly informed students’ design decisions.

Beyond the results and specificities of this pilot course, its structure and basic theoretical and practical tools set the tone for all service design courses that were designed and implemented afterwards. Two important references can be highlighted.

The first one is the use of the original service design framework proposed

by Pacenti3 based on the fundamental service components (service offering, system design, interaction, interfaces).

This framework helped to break down the complexity of services and facilitated

Media Design Thinking Performance Cooperative Representation

Service design course offering, including Studios Sequence, Collqs, Collabs and Labs.

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both analysis and ideation phases. The second was the definition of social innovation as a main driver/motivator for the thematic choices of the courses as well as its operational approach. Social innovation here is understood as (positive) practices emerging from creative and entrepreneurial people. They are framed not only as precedents for the development of new services but also as the very source of innovation.

In Spring 2010, the Area of Study of Service Design came into effect and we started implementing the sequence of service design studios following the logic presented in figure 1. The whole sequence runs for four sequential semesters, with students engaging just after concluding the first foundation year. It starts with a multidisciplinary course dedicated to create a basic vocabulary around interaction practices, systems, processes and tools.

The three sequential studios follow a

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By Lara Penin

Prototype of the “Service Design Repository” hosted at Parsons DESIS Lab website.

02.

three-tier approach, each one defining spaces where different themes or service areas can be circumscribed. Service and the Self involves services happening at the scale of the individual, looking at the new challenges facing services that determine personal wellbeing, synthesised as health care. ‘Services and the Household’ looks into the domestic environment (e.g. services related to housing) and New York City’s housing challenges (e.g. low income and affordable housing, student housing, collaborative living and others).

Finally ‘Services and the City’ focuses on services pertaining to the scale of the urban environment and how those can contribute to a dynamic city. This threetier structure offers a flexible framework through which different themes can be explored allowing for interchangeable themes (the issue of food and food systems, for example, can be explored in the three different scales).

Elective courses, either theory based (Colloqs) and studios that are specifically based on a partnership with an external organization (Collabs) are

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essential to provide the students a critical basis through which interpret cultural, social economic and political aspects surrounding contemporary service provisions as well as exposing them to real life service situations.

‘Colloq Service Design Concepts’, for example, interrogates the power dynamics involved in services, and the way these are obscured by branding and current service design techniques.

‘Colloq The Service Experience’ explores issues such as local commercial services working as social buffering zones between work and home.

Creating an In-house Service Design Community Creating a new area of study implies much more than designing a new set of courses. It implies, first and foremost, defining a cultural project. To do so, it is essential to nurture a professional and scientific community to which both faculty and students can refer and gauge their work against. The main support to build this cultural space and create a community is provided by Parsons DESIS Lab, (Design for Sustainable Social Innovation and Sustainability Lab)4, a research lab at Parsons whose mission is to advance the practice and discourse of design-enabled social innovation toward more sustainable cities. DESIS Lab uses Service Design as a means to apply design expertise into problem setting and

service design education

problem solving related to sustainable practices and social innovation.

Starting in May 2010, DESIS Lab has created a series of events – the ‘Service Design Performances’ – as an immersion experience in design for services, bringing together international professionals and scholars to present their work as well as presenting current and future areas of service design teaching and research at Parsons SDS. Parsons DESIS Lab is part of two major networks: DESIS network, active in different national and regional branches worldwide, as a “network of design labs based in design schools (or in designoriented universities) that promotes social innovation towards sustainability, acting as distributed design agency for social change.”5; and of course, the Service Design Network, which gathers the top service design expertise from both academia and practice dedicated to promoting service design.

Finally, in order to support our nascent service design community, it was essential to provide a main entry point through which students and faculty could access service design content. The ‘Service Design Repository’ is being designed as a virtual resource base with service design content to serve as a dynamic repository of papers, articles, tools, webposts, web resources, and others to account for the dynamic nature of service design knowledge.

Conclusion: In Defence of a Critical Approach to Service Design Education At this point, we are concluding the first complete cycle of implementation of our model. One important lesson learned is

that a great part of the pedagogical challenge for service design is that it needs to be understood as a cultural endeavour, with the definition of a clear, solid knowledge base that is constantly challenged by peers (e.g. the service design community worldwide).

An equally important conclusion is that innovative education needs to be supported by a research agenda. The construction of a service design area of study at the undergraduate level was a challenge that I, together with my colleagues, have personally embraced as an opportunity to steward courses that would directly benefit from the direct research inputs being generated at our research lab. Our response to this challenge has been far from a neutral courses scheme, but a reflection of our critical approach to service design, where social innovation is both a thematic and a methodological driver.

Far from being definitive, we hope this model will evolve and transform itself quickly, in particular, breaking the boundaries of specific programs and disciplinary silos but also reaching graduate level, which will be our next challenge.

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References 1

Mitrasinovic, M. in Designing W/ , published by The School of Design Strategies, Parsons The New School for Design, pp7.

2

It is important to contextualize the criticality of incarceration as a major social issue in the U.S.A, where one in 100 persons are currently behind bars, according the report One in 100: Behind Bars in America 2008 by The Pew Center on the States.

3

See Elena Pacenti’s PhD dissertation “Il Progetto dell’Interazione nei Servizi. Un Contributo al Tema della Progettazione dei Servizi” Politecnico di Milano,1998.

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Parsons DESIS Lab website http://desis.parsons.edu

5

DESIS Network website http://www.desis-network.org

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By Renna Al-Yassini, Miso Kim and Steve Selzer

Designing a Service Design Curriculum

Renna Al-Yassini is an interaction designer at Cooper, where she works with clients to design innovative products, services, strategies and business solutions.

Miso Kim is pursuing her interest in service design and information design through her PhD studies in the School of Design at Carnegie Mellon.

Steve Selzer is a senior interaction designer at frog design in San Francisco, working with individuals and organizations to imagine and create new products, services, strategies, and social value.

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The past decade has been witness to incremental development within the emerging practice of service design, as indicated by an increase in the number of service design organisations and academic programs around the world. As the practice grows, however, so has the desire to investigate fundamental questions. Many have weighed in on the emergent discussions, with varying points of view, on such questions as: who is a service designer? How is service design different from interaction design or other design practices? What are the core competencies of service designers?

To effectively prepare service designers, it is essential that educators and practitioners reach a shared understanding of these fundamental components. There is a need to further systematise, connect and establish a consistent curriculum about the ‘what’ and ‘why’ in addition to the ‘how’ of the practice. Both industry and academia are grappling with creating appropriate courses of study for the practice, with attempts to determine and collect the body of knowledge for preparation of practitioners. By reflecting on our experience in teaching two courses of Designing for Service in the Autumn of 2009 at Carnegie Mellon University, we hope to contribute to the conversation. In sharing our conceptual framework, goals, structure and

outcomes of our curriculum, we attempt to explain why the marriage of design theory and practice was especially helpful in teaching students to design for service.

Conceptual Framework Our personal experiences as design graduate students and practitioners validated the long-standing importance of theory coupled with practice. Theory can help in providing a framework for both defining and solving problems.

This is particularly useful when designing for services, as the nature of the problem is multi-faceted, value is co-produced by multiple stakeholders, and experiences elapse over time, across multiple touch points. For our courses,

research / insights • reading news in print is a luxury • people read news for relevancy • people think consuming news is good, ealthy habit • trusted news sources come in different forms • people still value print news-no exact replacement

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By Renna Al-Yassini, Miso Kim and Steve Selzer

WHAT IS

WHAT CAN BE

ABSTRACT

DIALECTIC

RHETORIC

CONCRETE

ANALYTICS

POETICS

A design process model 1

design practice was fundamentally about developing skills in facilitating and understanding, creating and giving form, as well as effectively and compellingly communicating solutions. Design theory dealt with systematic points of view regarding values, perspectives, and frameworks, aiding students to simultaneously work with parts and the whole and to facilitate multiple stakeholders’ perspectives.

The need for coupling theory and practice was acutely evident when working with a public service. Both classes had the local newspaper, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, as their project client. With the severe decline of the newspaper industry, the Post-Gazette was facing an uncertain future as it attempted to navigate changes in technology and information consumption. It served as a strong example of a wicked problem,2 with fuzzy boundaries, no obvious solution and highly diverse interests.

Framing the role of the newspaper as a public service required a deeper

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engagement of the students than an enterprise service provision might. The semester's client called upon students to challenge their assumptions and engage in conversation about values.

The adjacent model had been developed during an independent study

by CMU graduate students, including authors Al-Yassini and Selzer. Using Dubberly’s Analysis-Synthesis Bridge Model3 as a starting point, we layered Evenson’s service design project process4 and made connections to Buchanan’s model on design inquiry5. The model provided two uses for our classes: the first was as an overarching framework for the curriculum of both courses; the second was as the actual phases of the client project process. We framed each part of the project process with a theoretical underpinning, with theory informing the lectures and discussion as it related to the project process.

Our curricula also drew from two service design courses that had been previously taught, one practice-based course developed by Professor Evenson and another theory-based course developed by author Kim. We further designed the courses to work in conjunction: Designing for Service Studio and Designing for Service Seminar. While the studio emphasised the entire arc of the design project process with a real client, the seminar sought to provide students with a deep understanding of the diverse theories of service design. The goals of the combined curricula were to help students to: Foundation Explore this emerging sector of design, who is working in this space, what they

service design education

do, and the theoretical foundation of the concept of service as it relates to service design.

• Values Analyse the ethical aspect of service design, including the role of the designer, design thinking, and the social values related to public service.

• Process Participate in the entire arc of a service design project cycle with a real client, and have the opportunity to apply concrete methods along various points.

• Methods Explore and practice using a variety of research methods, and create conceptual models and information visualisations for communicate findings.

• Physical Artefacts + Service Practice making compelling products and service systems.

• Presentation Practice presenting to the client and communicating the tangible and intangible value of the proposed service systems to each stakeholder.

Seminar Class Structure Students were assigned readings exploring philosophical perspectives and introduced to established methods and models particular to service design.

The intention was not on claiming which approach was better: rather, it was to expose the students to different viewpoints and empower them with diverse mode of thinking to utilise when dealing with the particularities of different service design problems. Our hope was to inspire the conception of an

entirely new and creative approach for understanding and designing a service.

At the end of the course, students were encouraged to practice embodying the theoretical perspectives and frameworks during a shortened project about the PostGazette.

We began the seminar course by assigning readings regarding service design history, public service and design ethics related to the dialectical approach to service design. We gave an introduction about the nature of service and asked the question of what it means to design a service given the readings.

The course then deepened into three primary perspectives: analytics, rhetoric and poetics.

The analytical approach to service deals with identifying its components with a focus on infrastructure and function. Readings were selected from early service marketing articles, which attempted to objectively systematise service. The rhetorical approach emphasises the subjectivity of customers, presupposing that designing for service is about persuasion. Because of the intangible nature of service, part of the service quality is always subjective.

The role of the service designer is to create service concepts and arrange evidences in order to create a compelling argument. Readings from rhetoric and social sciences regarding person-toperson interaction were selected for understanding the philosophy, along with related literature from service marketing. The poetical approach proposes that the user is the agent of their actions who will be creating their own experience. This perspective is

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By Renna Al-Yassini, Miso Kim and Steve Selzer

most closely related to the current approach from the larger field of design that emphasises the choreography of experience and environment. We assigned readings from Aristotle's Poetics and Pragmatist Philosophy of experience as well as architecture, landscape, storytelling, and design writings in order to explicitly connect theory to the practice.

Studio Class Structure The studio course delved into project work immediately, giving students a short, two-week project before starting their semester-long client project with the Post-Gazette. We integrated the theory through selected readings, lectures and discussions as it pertained to each phase of the project process, providing concrete examples from industry and academia.

Two-thirds of the semester consisted of lectures and discussion of varying duration, with the last third reserved for collaborative work sessions, presentations and critiques. To demystify designing for service, we began by introducing a recognised service example, Jet Blue, and deconstructed its parts. To better orient students, we used several contemporary definitions of 'service' and 'service design,' and applied the definitions to the deconstructed service.

We outlined the project process to be followed, expected deliverables and the skills required of a practitioner.

Equipped with a superficial understanding of the components of a service and the design process, we gave students a two-week project as a crash course in designing for service. This allowed them to engage and grapple

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with the complexities and ambiguities in an environment that supported failure with a hypothetical client and prompt. This early, quick project allowed us as instructors to gain a better understanding of skills, personalities and styles in order to create teams that would be well suited to face a real client and more challenging project for the remainder of the semester. Additionally, we introduced the critique, setting the expectations for giving and receiving critical feedback. This was an especially important aspect for those who do not come from such an educational background.

For our newspaper client, emphasis was placed on problem framing. Student teams learned about a variety of research methods, and were encouraged to be discerning in their selection of which tools to utilise. Teams practiced collaboration and synthesis of their findings, naming emergent patterns.

They conceived, co-constructed, and tested possible solutions, and refined and documented their final designs.

Additionally, teams were responsible for managing their relationship with the client, creating presentations that communicated their progress at each stage of the process, and crafting their argument for their proposed solution.

We intended two things from this approach: the first was to keep teams moving through a difficult problem with a sense of where they were coming from and where they needed to go; the second was to encourage teams to maintain strong relations with the client, taking them through the process along with the team and building trust and buy-in.

service design education

Reflection Our experimental exploration of beginning with a conceptual framework, adapting prior class structures and combining theory and practice into a choreographed, two-course structure had mixed results once implemented.

While the students in both courses did value the distinct perspectives they were exposed to in each course, we intended all students to concurrently enrol in both courses. Most students did not do so due to their time constraints.

Additionally, the seminar class was a mix of graduate and undergraduate students, primarily from design majors, with a few from human-computer interaction and management and information science, as opposed to the studio class, which was comprised primarily of graduate students from the human-computer interaction department with only a few design majors. Dealing with ambiguity and plurality proved far more difficult for those students with technical backgrounds than it did for students with a background in design. To their credit and thanks to our flexibility in adapting the curriculum, they were able to make great strides toward trusting the process by the end of the semester.

All students appreciated the introduction to conceptual models and our systematised approach to the logic behind numerous service design methods, along with our systems-thinking approach. However, our encouragement to develop new conceptual models and methods of service design by teaching the principles behind the theory was a mixed experience. Students did venture to

create different research methods for extraction of information, experience, needs and desires from users. With the conceptual modelling of their findings, however, some struggled to create new communications, and reverted to past tried and true models and maps.

To further greater invention, future refinement of service design curricula will need to prototype approaches, allowing enough time and space to deepen students’ sense of competency.

Perhaps staggering the courses – offering the theory seminar during the first semester and the practice studio during the second semester – would be a more effective structure.

Although there is the need to continue to refine the process and to broaden the range of theories, a number of students later considered their work in the courses as some of their strongest portfolio pieces. The newspaper project offered tangible methods and tools for facilitating client projects that they were able to take with them to their workplaces. This model of the twocourse curriculum in 2009 went on to became the backbone of the one-course Designing for Service course that followed in CMU's School of Design.

References This model was developed by AlYassini, Cheek, Clapper, Selzer & Williams. Influenced by Evenson, Buchanan, Dubberly.

2 Rittel, Horst. and Webber, Melvin: Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning, pp. 155–169, Policy Sciences, Vol. 4, Elsevier Scientific Publishing Company, Inc., Amsterdam, 1973. [Reprinted in N. Cross (ed.), Developments in Design Methodology, J. Wiley & Sons, Chichester, 1984, pp. 135–144.]

3 Dubberly, Hugh, Evenson, Shelley, Robinson, Rick, Interactions Magazine, Analysis-Synthesis Model, March, 2008.

4 Renamed as definition, discovery, synthesis, ideation, realization, and presentation for our purposes . Based on Shelley Evenson, Carnegie Mellon University Lectures 2007-2009 .

5 Design science, or analytics; rhetoric; dialectic; and productive science, or poetics . From Buchanan, Richard, Strategies of Design Research: Productive Science & Rhetorical Inquiry, Design Research Now, 2007.

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Acknowledgement We sincerely appreciate Professor Evenson’s and Professor Buchanan’s contribution to our education at CMU, which directly inspired our conceptual framework and curriculum introduced in this paper. We also greatly appreciate the opportunity given to us by the leadership at the School of Design to teach these courses.

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photo: manun / photocase.com

chapter # 4

Background Stories Background Information from the World of Services.

By Vanja Misic

Service Jamming Around the World

It was 6pm, Friday night, March 11th, 2011 and the Global Service Jam (GSJ) was underway! Followers kept track of the GSJ on Twitter where the #gsj11 stream was constantly updated within seconds by hundreds of participants from 28 countries all around the world.

Originally created by Adam Lawrence and Markus Edgar Hormeß, the Global Service Jam (globalservicejam.org) is a collaborative event where people from various disciplines get together to create a new service within the short span of 48 hours. If that isn’t thrilling enough, it’s made all the more exciting by the fact that, despite the time difference, 203 teams all over the world were working simultaneously on the same brief. This year’s theme, ’Superheroes’, was playful and stimulated some great discussion among the

Vanja Misic, PhD Candidate at Swinburne University, Teacher and Lecturer for Service Design and Design Thinking

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teams. Many started off by posing the following questions: what is a superhero? Who can be a superhero? How do you become one? One of the main goals behind the GSJ was to allow people from different backgrounds to experience the journey of the design process in just two days. The countdown was on!

GSJ was conceived out of Markus’ and Adam’s frustrating experience of organizing events: a whole lot of talk and unfortunately not much action. Hence, one of their rules in the GSJ strongly reinforced doing not talking. Being involved in the wider Global Game Jam Movement, Markus believed it would be a great platform for Service Design: high energy, intense and, most importantly, a lot of doing, not talking.

Simply put, participants could really get a flavour for what the design process involved, and they could get their hands dirty in a fun environment. Markus and Adam’s attention was not only to build awareness of

1.

service design, but also to provide a practical medium for people to engage in, in order to stimulate further interest. Both found that prototyping in Service Design could sometimes be a real challenge, and this event created a strong and sound library of several hundred service prototypes along the way, as well as some really great designs.

Prior to the event commencing, Markus had an opportunity to work through and brainstorm ideas with the local hosts and their Global Jam, in particular Patti Hunt, organiser of the Melbourne Jam and one of the team members of the council, developing this year’s theme. She loved the creative exchange: she admired the attributing organisers “in creating an environment where anything was possible.” It definitely was an ideal avenue for collaboration, a way to simply have fun and interact with brilliant people and creatives from around the world. “We laughed a lot. There was late-night karaoke on Skype, people were making fun videos and posting them – when I saw the

background stories

2.

How it all began – Adam and Marcus worked out the idea for the Global Service Jam on the SDN Member's Day in Berlin | Impressions from the Jam at 2. Zaragoza, Spain | 3. Luxemburg | 4. Berlin, Germany | 5 + 7. Leeds, UK | 6. Orléans, France | 8. Rotterdam, The Netherlands 1.

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photos: 1. Martin Koziel / 2. Global Service Jam Zaragoza - Madrid - Valencia (facebook) / 3. Global Service Jam - Luxembourg Spot (facebook)/ 4. Global Service Jam Berlin (facebook) / 5. + 7. fa.nelson (flickr) / 8. Peet Sneekes (flickr) / 6. Global Service Jam Frances (facebook)

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Antwerp guys doing totally straight interviews in Superhero costumes I laughed so much that it hurt,” Adam recollects. “And I loved the moment when the guys in New Zealand woke up on Monday morning, went straight online and tweeted ‘does anybody still Jamming need help?’”

For several participants, the GSJ was a real eye-opener, witnessing diverse dynamics from teams all around the world, working on similar topics and discussing socio-cultural issues, resulting in 203 new services! By the end it was more than evident that the journey and process proved to be more important

than the outcome itself. It gave some significant insights into how design research methods can be successfully applied within such short time periods. Some jammers were using storytelling to engage in the design process, while others observed and interviewed in order to understand who needs a superhero need and in which circumstances.

As Markus states: “This was a first try, and it certainly had some rough edges. We'd simplify the submission process and find more ways to link the jams so people feel the global buzz while they are working.”

For the next jam, Adam is thinking of enlarging the global team. “People are surprised when we tell them that everything– the recruitment, the organisation, the filming and editing, the social media and the entire website construction – was done by just two guys parallel to our regular jobs. It was a bit much at times – but we loved it!”

The GSJ is a hands-on learning experience, one that is definitely recommended for all people out there who are inquisitive in areas of service design, but most importantly, the GSJ is open to those who come from completely disparate disciplines. As Adam mentions, it just goes to show that the “... GSJ is building global friendships and business links … the bigger it gets, the more fun it is!”

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By Ione Ardaiz Osacar

Service Jamming in Cologne, Germany

In Cologne, we also took part in the Global Service Jam challenge: to create a brand new service in just 48 hours. Service Design Network (SDN) and Kรถln International School of Design (KISD) hosted the event, which brought together a group of 55 participants, ranging from students to experts, and who had diverse multicultural backgrounds, coming, as they did, from four different continents.

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photos: Martin Koziel

background stories

This background richness, along with the participants’ positive enthusiasm, created a bright, open-minded and unforgettable atmosphere that lasted the whole weekend.

The opening of the GSJ in Cologne started with a presentation from Prof. Birgit Mager, introducing participants to service design and giving them some tips for developing projects in this field, using real-world examples. Directly afterwards, in an atmosphere of excitement and anticipation, the video prepared by the GSJ headquarters was shown. At first, the atmosphere in the room was one of silence and introspection, but, after less than a minute, the room grew louder as ideas started to flow

and Post-it notes started to appear all over the walls.

During the 47 hours that followed, teams were busy applying various service design tools in order to create and develop their ideas. Some teams went out to do field research, others started putting their services into practice on site and there was even some aerobic dancing and karaoke singing, which cheered everyone up. Thanks to sausages, cocktails and beer that were kindly provided by our sponsors, we all enjoyed a great evening, had the chance to meet fascinating people and much debate was simulated.

It really was a great weekend, and it became abundantly clear that the more we share our ideas, the richer those ideas become and that Service Design tools can help make the difference.

We hope this will be the first in a long series of Service Jams!

The organisers would like to thank all the ‘jammers’ for creating such a great atmosphere and for being so willing to take part. Moreover, we would like to thank all the sponsors who made this inspiring event possible: Horbach for their financial help and continuous presence during the weekend, 3M for all the Post-it notes, Peipers Druck Zentrum for the rolls of paper, the Früh brewery for the beer, Hennes butchers for the barbecue and Ramazzotti for the cocktails.

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Ione Ardaiz Osacar, SDN Assistant, project manager of the Global Service Jam in Cologne

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By Birgit Mager

SDN: Growing, Learning, Changing.

Birgit Mager, Co-founder of SDN, Professor for service design at KĂśln International School of Design (KISD), Cologne, Germany

Today, more than 150 universities, agencies and companies are members of the Service Design Network. With their membership, they support the international development of service design. Building knowledge, connecting people and communicating to the worlds of business, institutions and policy making. We started the network as a rather ad hoc initiative of service design academics: academics with a dream of a strong and influential service design community. “If you can dream it you can do it�: time and again, this Disney aphorism has been proven true.

Our dream has led us to create a platform, newsletters, conferences and a regularly published journal. Supported by a young and highly motivated team, working at the University of Applied Sciences in Cologne, we have connected with many people, both professionals and students.

Today, with SDN, we have achieved a quality and a critical mass that calls for professional management and for intense community involvement.

Within the last year, the structure of SDN has evolved and it is continuously doing so. Transparency, involvement and national and regional chapters are the major objectives for the next steps.

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The future of SDN will be a joint effort: we have found a great a core team for the SDN Advisory Board. They will lead the discussion on the strategic and organisational development of the SDN. We are currently looking for three more highly motivated members for this team.

Touchpoint, the journal of the SDN, is now in its third year and has been warmly received by the service design community. The TP Advisory Board will drive the journal to evergreater standards of quality and authority, making it more interesting, integrating discussions, focusing on wider distribution and making it financially viable.

background stories

the sdn team Birgit Mager, Co-founder of SDN, chief editor of Touchpoint, Professor for service design at KISD, Cologne, Germany Pascal Bayer, SDN accountant Miriam Becker, Project manager, Touchpoint journal and newsletter Christopher Kreuch, Touchpoint accountant Ione Ardaiz Osacar, SDN intern, responsible for social media

Mauro Rego, Project manager, SDN conference Katrina Rundic, SDN tutor Ellen Simmons, SDN tutor Bettina Thielen, Project manager Jeannette Weber, Project manager, member support and website Thomas Wasilewski, SDN administrator

For photos of the SDN team members look at bit.ly/sdnteam

After organising conferences in Amsterdam, Madeira, Berlin and Cambridge the small Cologne team will now pass on the responsibility for conference organisation to the SDN members who are really rooted in the community: this year’s SDN conference will take place in San Francisco and it will be chaired by Jamin Hegeman and Alex Nisbett, supported by an international team and by Mauro from the SDN Cologne team. And if you are interested in helping in any way, please do contact Jamin and Alex!

In 2011 there will also be two smaller SDN conferences in Madrid, Spain and Paris, France.

The international SDN has initiated and supported many activities at an international level, but each international community has its specific needs: in some countries, great national initiatives have been started and

the sdn advisory board

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1 | David Clayton, Commercial manager, The Guardian, London, UK

4 | Jens Hoffmann, CEO, Hoffmann Consulting, Hamburg, Germany

2 | Shelley Evenson, Principal user experience director, Microsoft, Cambridge, MA, USA

5 | Mark Jones, Associate partner, IDEO, Chicago, USA

3 | Jamin Hegeman, Interaction and service designer, Adaptive Path, San Francisco, USA

6 | Alex Nisbett, Service design consultant, London, UK

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By Birgit Mager

the conference chairs 1 | Jamin Hegeman, Interaction and service designer, Adaptive Path, San Francisco, USA

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2 | Alex Nisbett, Service design consultant, London, UK

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the touchpoint advisory board

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1 | Kerry Bodine, VP & principal analyst, customer experience, Forrester Research, Cambridge, MA, USA

4 | Jeff Howard, Editor of ‘Design for Service’ and independent design consultant, San Francisco, USA.

2 | Shelley Evenson, Principal user experience director, Microsoft, Cambridge, MA, USA

5 | Craig La Rosa, Principal, Continuum, Boston, USA.

3 | Jesse Grimes, Senior service design consultant, Informaat, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

6 | Birgit Mager, Co-founder of SDN, chief editor of Touchpoint, Professor for service design at KISD, Cologne, Germany

networks have been built; in other countries, they are being built in close cooperation with the SDN. We are now creating structures that support the development of national SDN chapters. Groups that can work tightly focused on the needs of their community, partners and potential clients. We provide a support system, offer workshop units and financial basics. Austria and Germany are pilots: if you want to join in and start national initiatives, then please contact us for support.

If you have already built national structures and you would like to connect to the international network you are very welcome!

Since January, we have had a wonderful intern at SDN, Ione Ardaiz Osacar. She is focusing on social media, and if you want to connect to all the activities of the SDN, have a look at our website at bit.ly/sdnhome and visit us on Facebook on.fb.me/sdnface.

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background stories

Service Design Network Austria Has Come Alive!

SDN Austria is one of the first national chapters of the international Service Design Network (SDN). On the 18th of January 2011, the founding meeting of SDN Austria took place in Graz and was hosted by ISN (Innovation Service Network).

photo: The Herrengasse by Storm Crypt / flickr

Together with the core group of Austrian SDN members, the goals, the organisation and activities of SDN Austria were collaboratively defined. The main objectives are: • Enlarging the knowledge base of Service Design in Austria • Acting as an interface between the SDN and differing local needs within the Austrian service sector • Channelling the energy as well as the expertise of Austrian service designers • Creating awareness of service design • Knowledge transfer and learning from each other • Creating projects together SDN Austria is organised as an open network with a strong core team and close connection to SDN. Consequently, we have defined four different levels of participation: all those interested in service design (Level 1) are invited to take part in all public events given by SDN Austria, such as Service Design Drinks; SDN Austria Members (Level 2) will pro-

actively share know-how and project experience; SDN Austria core-team members (Level 3) are full members of SDN; SDN Austria Representatives (Level 4) act in the interests of SDN Austria within the international network. Those representatives are Martin Schobert (tourismusdesign. com), Marc Stickdorn (MCI Management Center, Innsbruck) and Roland Winkler (ISN).

In Austria, the following two important future application areas for Service Design have been identified: first, improving the tourist experience is a key issue, second, the emphasis is being put on developing and designing innovative services for eMobility. We are looking forward to implementing these projects, to sharing knowledge and presenting results in Touchpoint and at service design conferences.

The first SDN Austria event ‘Service Design Thinks Graz’ took place on the 5th of April 2011. The next Service Design Thinks will be held on the 29th of June.

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Reinhard Willfort, Managing Director, ISN – Innovation Service Network, www.innovation.at

Roland Winkler, ISN Managing Partner and Head of IITF – Institute of Innovation and Trend Research, www.iitf.at

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By Lauren Tan, Nick Marsh and Jaimes Nel

Service Designing:

A Network for Service Designers, by Service Designers

Lauren Tan is completing her PhD research (co-sponsored by Northumbria University and the Design Council) on the Design Council’s Dott 07 (Designs of the Time) initiative and design for public service and social innovation.

Nicholas Marsh is currently Service Design Director at Sidekick Studios.

Nick blogs about service design, thinking and other interesting things at Choosenick! which can be found at choosenick.com

Jaimes Nel is an artist, researcher and designer living in London.

Jaimes works for leading service design studio, Live|work, and authors online hub GNVA Projects which can be found at gnva.com

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Since 2008, the London service design community has grown from a series of informal gatherings to a global network of service designers and people interested in service design.

Under the name Service Designing, two streams of events are run that provide hubs for networking and learning about service innovation. Service Design Drinks are monthly, informal drinks nights bringing together service designers, while Service Design Thinks is a platform to hear and share stories and experiences of service design practice. Both events endeavour to reach out and connect with some of the world’s most progressive designers and innovators.

This paper outlines the story and evolution of the Service Designing community in London and around the world.

The Background Story Over the last decade, the emergence of many design companies working in the area of service design has formed an authoritative industry and voice, gaining interest from designers, businesses, organisations and government. London, in particular, has become a focal point for service design with the establishment, some ten years ago, of pioneering service design companies such as Live|work and Engine. This, partnered with favourable political and economic conditions,

saw the rise of other design companies working in the area of service design.

Today, the UK is known to comprise the highest number of design companies where service design is the core competency. Despite this, service design companies constitute about 0.1% of the total number of design companies in the UK 1. The industry is small, emergent and located within close geographical proximity, with a majority of service designers and companies based in London.

As an emerging branch of the design discipline, service design lent itself to an

“… we began organising meetings, called ‘Service Design Drinks’, on an informal basis for service designers and people interested in service design to share experiences, work, projects, stories and ideas.”

atmosphere of openness, a willingness to share and also to learn, but the industry was missing opportunities for: • Learning from service design practices (rather than theory and literature) • More informal interactions and • Grassroots activity

financial commitment required for conferences. Could we also share the grittier side of service design practice, rather than emphasise the theory?

With the identification of these opportunities came three hypotheses:

With these three hypotheses and the belief that community cohesion and interaction could only positively influence this emerging area of design, a series of events were created to explore service design.

• Could learning from practice, rather than theory and literature, bring a voice to the industry, better inform service design studios and generate new knowledge about service design?

• Could more informal interactions (as opposed to existing formal interactions such as conferences) facilitate increased openness and sharing of service design practice?

• Could these informal interactions be based on what we wanted as service designers and design studios? For example, could events be free? While many of us were eager to learn and absorb new design knowledge, we found it challenging to make the

The Evolution of the Service Designing Community In 2008, we began organising meetings on an informal basis for service designers and people interested in service design to share experiences, work, projects, stories and ideas. These meetings, called ‘Service Design Drinks’, took place around London in various pubs and quickly began to grow in size and popularity.

Opportunities to extend the Drinks concept to further support the industry were soon recognised. This new event had to be free of charge and maintain the informality of Drinks, which everyone seemed to enjoy.

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By Lauren Tan, Nick Marsh and Jaimes Nel

“We believe that in the space of service design, which is still young and emergent, there are many opportunities to explore other innovative models for learning and sharing service design knowledge.”

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There was a real interest in learning and sharing the ‘doing’ of service design and the challenges and issues that came with it. There was also an interest in being inspired, so we sought various speakers for an event, including those who might not call themselves service designers but whose practices overlapped with service design. Nick devised the name Service Design Thinks, our good friends at Sense Worldwide offered us the use of their Soho loft space and another good friend, The Team, offered sponsorship for drinks.

The first Thinks event took place in 2009, and four service designers spoke about what they do and how they do it, under the themes of Research, Design, Evaluation and Management 2. We asked the speakers to put aside business pitching and glossed-over stories, and share with the community the gritty insight into service design practice.

The first Thinks was really successful and became a quarterly event each year3.

In conjunction with Thinks, Drinks continued to be run regularly on the last Friday of each month.

By 2009, London’s service designing community was growing rapidly and the use of social media to promote event information had the dual advantage of giving the community international exposure. Our email boxes filled up with messages from people around the world interested in the concept, and who wanted to know how they could run Service Designing events in their own cities.

We designed and built an online hub at www.servicedesigning.org that would let London and other cities coordinate events by logging their details

online. A short manifesto4 acts as a loose guide for all city coordinators hosting Service Designing events. To date, fifteen cities in thirteen countries worldwide now coordinate and host their own Service Designing events. And today, we still receive emails from cities requesting to join the global community.

The growth of the Service Designing community was evolutionary, from its initial idea, to the kind of events that occur and to how cities around the world now share the same model.

But the journey has not been without a few challenges. We operate as a not-for-profit company and organising, coordinating and hosting events is based on the volunteered time of city coordinators. The two main challenges we face are space and money. Even though there have been many London Service Design Drinks nights, we still experiment with different pub locations, always looking for something that might be a better space and location. For our Thinks nights, Sense Worldwide have been wonderful sponsors, but sponsorship for drinks and travel allowances for our speakers is a little harder. So far Thinks has counted on the generosity of The Team, Sense Worldwide, radarstation and our own pockets. To raise funds we have experimented with various methods such as donations on the night and providing advertising space when service design companies are looking for talent.

We believe that in the space of service design, which is still young and emergent, there are many opportunities to explore other innovative models for learning and sharing service design knowledge. Each city endeavours to bring

background stories

an awareness and voice to service design by service designers, facilitating an open exchange of ideas and experiences. We hope the future of service design can take inspiration and lessons from these experiences and progressively move forward in the realms of service design learning, education and practice.

We want to thank all Service Designing city coordinators for their dedication and time in making Service Design Drinks, Thinks and service design discussions around the world a great success.

All cities and contact details for Service Designing events can be found at: www. servicedesigning.org

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References 1 The Design Council’s ‘Design Industry Insights 2010’ report states there are 10,800 design companies in the UK. A headcount of a dozen service design companies in the UK show that the service design industry constitutes to 0.11% of the total number of UK design consultancies.

2 For a short report on Service Design Thinks 1 see: http://tinyurl.com/ServiceDesignThinks1 3 Reports on Service Design Thinks 2 and 3 can be found at http://tinyurl.com/ServiceDesignThinks2 and http://tinyurl.com/ServiceDesignThinks3 respectively.

4 See http://servicedesigning.org/about

Great ideas on your hands NOW

Touchpoint is now available as e-book!

Order now at bit.ly/sdn-ebook and have it instantly on your e-reader for U$ 4.99*. * Price for US and CA buyers. It can vary depending on your country of residence.

service design snapshots

from around the world

#1, 3

#2

#1.

competitive edge: service design challenges I remember very well when, in 1997, we created the first design award for service design. Eva Gerber – at that time the head of the Design Center Langenthal in Switzerland – was a driving force in making this happen.

She and I strongly believed in the leading role of service design for the future of society and the economy.

Over a period of three years, we invested a lot of time and energy in this conviction, an investment that paid off: we had great award winners and wonderful juries. However, it took a lot of effort: it was very hard to communicate what service design actually is, and how a company could make their efforts in designing services visible. In addition, we had great services innovations, but few service designers, so we had to reflect on the role of professional service designers versus good and empathetic business developers, marketers, owners and creative startups. At that time, we really faced the challenges of positioning design in the service world.

Today, we still are waiting for an internationally relevant service design award, and it should be a task for the Service Design Network members to create it. At the same time, we are seeing how service

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design is becoming a natural part of competitions.

The Royal College of Art London was among the very first to invite service design projects, and of course it is a particular personal pleasure to remember how the KISD Service Design Team won the award in 2005.

Since then, I have tried to encourage my students to go in for competitions: it is one of many channels to put the amazing capabilities of this young discipline front and centre. At KISD, we have won several awards by using the service design approach: recently, the ‘Stair Talk‘ and ‘Energie Labor’ projects were recognised with awards by the German Ministry of Education and Research. Students from KISD also won the Service Innovation Award, set up by Philips (see also the News section). The Philips award was particularly rewarding: it placed service design right in the centre of service science, showing its holistic, interdisciplinary and integrative competencies that go beyond the perspectives of engineers and marketers.

I am very pleased to see that Core77 has created a service design thread in their competition, and I am really looking forward to seeing the SDN community entering some amazing projects there.

Please do share your experiences with awards and competitions and your successes, and

let us build a service design strategy and tactics on the back of these!

Birgit Mager, Professor for Service Design at KISD, Cologne, Germany

#2.

the value of craft: service design thinking and making The literature on our collective bookshelves overwhelmingly favours design thinking but the value of our craftsmanship is just as important when it comes to learning about service design.

Over the past six months, designers from around the world have recommended dozens of titles for a co-created online library of service design books. But as the project continues to evolve, there

photos: Service Design Making – Miriam Becker / Book – Jakob Schneider

are some notable gaps. The growing collection includes references on design thinking, research and theory, but practically nothing that illuminates the complex relationship between designers and craft. There are few formal books on service design at the moment, but those that do exist and those on the horizon seem to focus mainly on how designers think and not on what they make.

In some ways this reflects the intangibility that sets services apart from more traditional areas of design. It also addresses the interest within the business community on design thinking. But the ability to shape the world by crafting artefacts and experiences is integral to our value as designers. The tangible aspects of services can be crafted well or poorly, and our creative ideas can be translated crudely or with grace.

As designers, we should embrace the power to craft our vision as a balanced complement to the continued emphasis on design thinking.

As the service design community matures, it is critical that we continue to learn from other disciplines. What are the classic works on sketching, modelling, building and crafting and how can those skills impact our ability to design services, experiences and transformations? Some of these books may not exist and if that is the case, then it is up to members of the community to fill the void.

Articles in Touchpoint are a good place to begin. As new authors take up the challenge, they can move the practice forward by addressing the full spectrum of service design thinking and making.

Jeff Howard, editor of Design for Service and independent design consultant, San Francisco, USA

#3.

this is service design thinking This book weighs in at 372 pages and is bound in a mat black hardcover, confidently stating This is Service Design Thinking.

It is a crowdsourcing book: the collaborative, co-creative act of dozens of authors and contributors aiming to introduce service design to a broad target group of students, teachers, practioners, researchers and managers from all backgrounds. This heterogeneous approach needs structure, and the three sections basics, tools and cases guide the reader through this ambitious project.

This is Service Design Thinking looks at service design from different perspectives, giving an overview on existing methods and examples of service design practice. It is easy to read and well laid out. Many

pre-eminent thinkers in the field have contributed small pieces to this kaleidoscope of service design.

Due to the variety of authors and their heterogeneous backgrounds, there are some contradictions and some gaps, something that will certainly promote discussion.

It would be nice if a future edition brought more awareness of the strategic focus of service design and of the business impact.

We need to create an awareness of service design as a discipline that influences culture, processes, people, interactions and evidences, and thus creates value for people.

This is Service Design Thinking is a great project and the initiators and contributors deserve great respect.

Birgit Mager, Professor for Service Design at KISD, Cologne, Germany

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dos & don’ts service design

Please, do it right!

The Town Hall of Pamplona decided to start building cycle lanes around the city to promote the use of this ecological means of transport. But they were in such a hurry to boast about how many kilometers they had

built that they didn't have time to take certain obstacles out of the way of the riders and they also forgot some steps on the way.

Almost all the bike lanes are designated by broken lines and cycle symbols painted in white on the existing pavement. A lot of them are ‘stop and start’ and, in many cases, you have to ride either on the road or on the pavement.

Is great to have this level of commitment from the authorities, but when you promote a service for your inhabitants, please, do it right.

If you are interested in having a look at some jaw-dropping images or reading the opinions of local residents, you can have a look at the following blog: http://erroresyhorrores.blogspot.com Ione Ardaiz Osacar, Iruña-Pamplona, Spain

No Buses The bus stop in my neighbourhood was moved across a major street to accommodate new, faster express buses (they run in dedicated lanes and are you pay for your ticket before you get on). The official sign doesn't say that ALL buses have been moved to the new bus stop and NO buses will stop here. The handwritten amendments give the full story, in English and Chinese (this stop is on the border of Chinatown).

Stephanie Aaron, New York, USA

‘Fallin’ Debris The misspelling on this sign on construction scaffolding confused me as to whether I should be looking out for debris that had fallen or would be falling. Not to mention that it is the responsibility of the company doing the work to make sure that nothing falls on passers-by.

Stephanie Aaron, New York, USA

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share your service experiences The Do’s and Don’ts-page in Touchpoint is a special feature, which provides space for our readers to publish their pictures and experiences from the world of services. Make use of this opportunity and share service flaws or outstanding service successes with an international audience!

the assignment If you would like to see your story published here, please send in a photo,

Small Message – Big Smile Unpacking a book that I ordered recently from an Amazon reseller, I expected standard printed delivery documents. But instead I found

this Post-It note on the book, which instantly put me in a good mood.

together with a text describing the situation depicted, which illustrates your personal (positive or negative)

Miriam Becker, Köln, Germany.

Service Design highlights, to: journal@ service-design-network.org. The Service Design Network Office collects all stories and chooses three to four examples to be published in each issue.

‘Pick a Taxi!’

On a recent trip to Hong Kong, we were standing in the queue for taxis at a major train station, only to find this sign! Just how does one achieve this feat? The train station itself was well signposted and we managed to navigate our way. However, the indoor and outdoor spaces were not designed together! (Our theory on the paper note attached to the sign – someone got lost catching the middle taxi!)

Sunil Bhandari, Melbourne, Australia.

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member map

service design network Denmark 1508 A/S, Copenhagen Aalborg University - School of Architecture and Design, Aalborg Copenhagen Living Lab, Copenhagen Innovation Center Copenhagen, Copenhagen Norway AHO University, Oslo Designit, Oslo Making Waves, Oslo The Netherlands Delft University of Technology , Delft Dr. Kominski's Social Service Design, Amsterdam Edenspiekermann, Amsterdam Informaat, Baarn Media Catalyst, Amsterdam Mixe - medical marketing, Zeist Philips Research, Eindhoven Rotterdam University of Applied Sciences, Rotterdam Service Science Factory, Maastricht T+Huis, Eindhoven The Other Side Of The Moon, Amsterdam Utrecht University of Applied Sciences, Utrecht Luxembourg integratedPlace, Luxembourg Belgium Kite Consultants, Waarschoot Yellow Window, Antwerpen

France Attoma, Paris NEKOE, Orleans Orange-ftpgroup, Paris Uinfoshare, Paris USER STUDIO, Paris VEEB DESIGN, Rhone Canada Ascent Group, Vancouver Cooler Solutions, Toronto lvl studio, Montreal Normative Design, Toronto YuCentrik Inc., Montréal USA 3ds, California, CA Adaptive Path, San Francisco, CA Carnegie Mellon, Pittsburg, PA Continuum, West Newton, MA Frontier Service Design, Malvern, PA Genentech, Inc, San Francisco, CA Hot Studio, San Francisco, CA Info Retail, Atlanta Mc Donald´s Corporation, Oak Brook, IL New Era Soft, New York, NY Parsons The New School for Design, New York, NY Paulvoglewede.com, San Francisco, CA SCAD University, Savannah, GA Skyworks Solutions Inc., Woburn, MA THE MEME, Cambridge, MA Ireland Centre for Design Innovation - Institute of Technology Sligo, Sligo Hygge service design & innovation, Dublin Servitize, Kilkenny United Kingdom Capita, London Design London | Imperial College Business School, London Design Wales, Cardiff Engine, London Eurostar Group Ltd, London Flywheel Ltd, Beaconsfield IDEO, London Imagination Lancaster, Lancaster live|work, London Naked Eye Research, London NHS Institute for Innovation and Improvement, Warwick Prospect , London Radarstation, London Sheffield Hallam University, Sheffield Seren Partners, London STBY, London Strategyn, Cranfield thinkpublic, London Virgin Atlantic Airways Ltd, Crawley

Chile Procorp, Metropolitana Colombia Los Andes University, Bogota Brazil Igorsaraiva.com, Brasilia ISG Consulting, Rio de Janeiro UFRJ/COPPE- Federal University of Rio de Janeiro - DESIS group, Rio de Janeiro Portugal Novabase, Lisboa University of Madeira – Madeira Interactive Technologies Institute, Funchal

Spain FunkyProjects, Bilbao

Germany Fjord, Berlin gravity, Munich Hoffmann Consulting, Hamburg KIT - Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Karlsruhe Köln International School of Design, Cologne Macromedia Hochschule für Medien und Design, Munich MetaDesign, Berlin Rudolf Haufe Verlag, Wolfsburg service works, Cologne Southwalk., Rheine StrategicPlay, Hamburg Sturm & Drang, Hamburg tackle | Service Design - Jan Krause & Cordula Brenzei, Ravensburg Tieto Deutschland, Eschborn T-Labs, Berlin Volkswagen, Wolfsburg Work•Play•Experience, Schwaig ZBW - Deutsche Zentralbibliothek für Wirtschaftswissenschaften, Kiel Sweden Business & Design Lab University of Gothenburg, Göteborg Chalmers University of Technology, Göteborg Ergonomidesign, Bromma Design Västerbotten, Umeå Doberman, Stockholm Linköping University, Linköping Tieto Corporation, Älvsjö Transformator, Stockholm Slovenia Gorenje design studio d.o.o., Velenje Poland Uniwersytet Ekonomiczny w Poznaniu, Poznan Finland Culminatum Ltd Oy , Espoo e21 Solutions Oy, Helsinki Grey Direct & Digital, Helsinki Jyväskylä University of Applied Sciences, Jyväskylä Kuopio University of Design, Kuopio Lahti University of Applied Sciences, Lahti Laurea University of Applied Sciences , Espoo Palmu Inc., Helsinki Taivas, Helsinki University of Art and Design Helsinki, TaiK, Helsinki Yatta Corporation Ltd., Helsinki Estonia Brand Manual, Tallinn University of Tartu, Pärnu College, Pärnu Turkey KIRMIZI KALEM, Istanbul China Guangzhou Acadamie of Fine Art, Guangzhou Jiangnan University, Wuxi Korea Creative Design Institute, Sungkyunkwan University, Suwon Hyun Kim, Seoul i-CLUE DESIGN, Seoul Kaywon School of Art and Design, Gyeonggi-do Kyung-jin Hwang, Seoul NCsoft Corporation, Seoul SK Telecom, Seoul teaminterface, Seoul Xener Systems, Seoul New Zealand Ministry of Justice New Zealand, Wellington Taiwan Chili Consulting Corp., Taipei Institute for Information Industry, Taipei Taiwan Design Center, Taipei Austria DTF Business Development GmbH, Vienna IITF - Institut für Innovations- und Trendforschung, Graz ISN - Innovation Service Network GmbH, Graz MCI Management Center Innsbruck, Innsbruck Mobilkom Austria, Vienna tourismusdesign, Tulln an der Donau

Australia BT Financial Group, Sydney Huddle Design, VIC Melbourne Meld Studios, Stanmore Proto Partners, Sydney Russel Baker, Canberra Swinburne University of Technology, Melbourne University of Canberra, Bruce

Switzerland customfuture SA, Baar Dimando AG, Zurich Luzern Universtiy of Applied Sciences and Arts, Luzern

Italy Experientia, Torino Domus Academy, Milano Politecnico di Milano - Facoltá del Design, Milano

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SAN FRANCISCO This year’s Service Design Conference will take place at San Francisco, California, USA. The topic From Sketchbook to Spreadsheet is about exploring the critical relationship between service design and business. The call for contribution is open now! Watch the SDN website to stay updated!

About Service Design Network The Service Design Network is a forum for practitioners and academics 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.

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

Photo: Calibas, commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Golden_Gate_bridge_pillar.jpg

service design conference