Meet the service designer: Lia Patrício

In this issue’s profile, Touchpoint editor Jesse Grimes speaks with Lia Patrício, Assistant Professor at the University of Porto. She is one of the leading members of the Marie Curie Service Design for Innovation - Innovative Training Network (SDINITN), which falls under the European Commission’s Horizon 2020 framework.

I've recently heard that you've been successful in securing funding from the European Commission for a "Service Design for Innovation" project to be carried out by your university and eight other partners. Can you share some more information about this training program?

Indeed, the Marie Curie Service Design for Innovation Innovative Training Network (SDIN-ITN) was recently accepted for funding within the Horizon 2020 framework. SDIN aims to fully leverage service design creative power to foster innovation. As you know, service design is a growing academic and professional field with great potential to foster service innovation. However, service design and service innovation frameworks are still dispersed, and better integration and systematisation is needed for widespread usage across organisations.

SDIN is a research training programme that integrates service design and service innovation in a multidisciplinary approach. The SDIN network will specifically address the development of service design for innovation methods and tools, the design for increased stake holder participation in value co-creation and the design of complex service systems and value networks.

The SDIN network involves nine partners and will start on January 1st, 2015 and will run for four years. On the academic side, the network involves six pioneering universities in service design and innovation: Porto (coordinating university), Cologne, Karlstad, Lancaster, Linköping and Maastricht. On the nonacademic side, the project will involve three innovative organisations: County Council of Värmland (public services), EDP Comercial (energy utilities), and IBM (ICT). Each partner will host an early stage researcher (ESR). The nine ESRs will have the opportunity to conduct research in both academic and non-academic environments, and will take advantage of the diverse set of competences of the network partners. This will ensure both academic excellence and managerial relevance of project results.

For service design practitioners and the non-academic members of the Service Design Network, the world of academia can feel somewhat distant from their day-to-day work in the field. This training programme sounds like it will directly impact the commercial practice of service design and bring innovation into organisations throughout Europe. The grant itself is also for a significant amount of money in total: €2.3 million euros. What do you envisage as the ideal outcome once the project is complete?

The amount is a significant investment in the service design and innovation area. The core of the project is the development of an innovative training program involving the individual PhD interdisciplinary projects with strong involvement of non–academic partners. The network will also create a new set of courses in the SDIN area, new workshops, conferences and dissemination events open to the public, which will hopefully build the basis for the development of a European-wide doctoral programme in the area.

All researchers will spend at least ten months in the non-academic sector. The research projects will have a direct impact on the creation of innovative services, or the application of service design and innovation methods and tools to real-world situations. Research projects cover a diverse set of areas, such as customer involvement in healthcare, service ecosystems in the utilities sector, or innovative services based on wearable technologies. This strong involvement of the non-academic sector ensures that both the training and the research results have strong impact on both academic programs and organisational practices.

The network will help organisations tackle the increasing complexity of their environment through the human-centred, systemic and creative approach of service design. It will also systematise and evolve service design methods, so they can be more easily applied by organisations. To this end, the results will be shared with the community through open activities and conferences and the development of a service design for innovation toolbox. The objective is to share the results with the service design and innovation community at large, in order to produce spillover effects beyond the partners of the network.

For those practitioners that have had very little contact with the academic world of service design, what do you recommend they do in order to benefit from (and support) the work that is being done in design schools and universities such as yours? What can be done to bridge these worlds so that they mutually benefit each other?

In the research projects I have been involved in, we have always worked with companies (retail, banking, ICT), or governmental organisations (e.g. the Portuguese Ministry of Health). My experience is that companies are sceptical at first. Service design is still a new field and the intangibility of the service process is still challenging.

In the first meetings, managers frequently ask: “What are the deliverables, the outcomes of the project?” But once managers get involved in the project, they start recognising the creative power of service design with its visualisation tools and its human-centred, systemic approach.

I believe bridging the two worlds requires both academics and practitioners to be open and willing to understand, assimilate and answer each others’ concerns and needs. Both sides have much to learn and gain from this mutual co-operation, but they need to overcome the initial barriers. Projects like SDIN are excellent opportunities to bridge this gap and provide the experience and tools needed to overcome early misalignments of communication and expectations. All partners are very enthusiastic with the SDIN network and hope it will boost the role of service design in innovation, both in academia and in organisational practices.

The theme of this issue of Touchpoint is ’Blurring Boundaries’. We wanted to further explore the disciplines that share some qualities with service design and to hear how their intersections might inspire our readers. Your roots are in service science and service engineering, and this SDIN project shows that you are now deeply involved in service design. What triggered this shift in your interests?

My background is in business, but I did my PhD in industrial engineering and management, related to the design of technology-enabled services. Through that experience, I came into contact with researchers from management, engineering and design. My first approach to service design built upon service management, such as blueprinting and interaction design, the latter addressing the technology components of service interactions. After my PhD, I worked in several service design projects with a multidisciplinary set of researchers – from design, management, psychology and engineering – and became increasingly interested in service design approaches that leverage the humancentred, creative and iterative design thinking process while integrating multidisciplinary perspectives from service science, management, design and engineering. I have also been involved in the creation of a masters degree in service engineering and management at the University of Porto, where I have been teaching new service development and design since 2008.

Service design provides a powerful approach to creating new service futures, but designing and implementing new services requires the work of multidisciplinary teams and the involvement of different organisational areas. The concepts created through service design then need to be implemented by service managers, marketeers, software engineers and other members of the organisation. Service design has evolved as a multidisciplinary field, but I believe further work is needed to incorporate these multiple perspectives into the design process and also to communicate with other areas for service design implementation. In this regard, the strong visual and modelling methods and tools used by service design can provide valuable help in this process.

Lia Patrício is assistant professor at the University Porto. Her research interests are service design for the customer experience and for complex service systems and value networks. She has coordinated several service design projects, such as the design of the Portuguese Electronic Health Record, and is the coordinator of the Marie-Curie Innovative Training Network entitle Service Design for Innovation, starting in January 2015 for four years.