tools and me thods
Practicing in Place Applying a service design approach to project partnerships
In recent years, design teams working both in-house and at consultancies are increasingly applying the service design mindset and methods across a wide variety of projects. This is changing the nature of our creative working relationships with clients, managers, and colleagues from other disciplines. Working with others to align and integrate a holistic vision across delivery channels for a complex service brand raises new tactical and process challenges for service designers. We may be discovering that, regardless of the project or industry, the answer may lie in how we apply service design thinking to our own daily team practices. The service design community welcomed the release of the Design for Service Innovation & Development Final Report (DeSID)1 as it provided a theory and framework to describe categories of service design projects that designers are now encountering. Case studies contextualised the role of service design in areas of new service development and innovation, and described the evolving nature of the designer/client relationship. This led me to reflect on the nature of recent service design projects that I had worked on and the stories I’d heard from colleagues. 1 Sangiorgi, Daniela, et al. (2015). Design for Service Innovation & Development Final Report. [Online] Retrieved August 5, 2015, from http://imagination. lancs.ac.uk/sites/default/files/outcome_ downloads/desid_report_2015_web.pdf
The projects fit DeSID’s descriptions, but there are also deeper patterns in what my colleagues and I are experiencing on these project teams. New challenges present themselves and we are discovering ways to successfully address them. In this article, I’ll call these ‘practices in place’: how to apply service design principles to actions and choices while working on new services and service innovation projects. Using the Design Council’s descriptions of the DeSID categories as a framework, I’ll describe what the challenges look and feel like, share examples from my experience with design teams and partners, and detail how specific practices have helped to transform project outcomes and positively influence how people adopt service design tools and methods on internal teams.
Dianna Miller is Assistant Professor of Industrial and Interaction Design at Syracuse University. She is a former program coordinator of the Service Design BFA/ MFA at Savannah College of Art & Design and a graduate of the Interaction Design Institute Ivrea. She has over 20 years of experience on design, research, and innovation teams.
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