Service design

Service design is the activity of planning and organizing people, infrastructure, communication and material components of a service in order to improve its quality and the interaction between the service provider and its customers. Service design may function as a way to inform changes to an existing service or create a new service entirely. Service design is the activity of planning and organizing people, infrastructure, communication and material components of a service in order to improve its quality and the interaction between the service provider and its customers. Service design may function as a way to inform changes to an existing service or create a new service entirely. The purpose of service design methodologies is to establish best practices for designing services according to both the needs of customers and the competencies and capabilities of service providers. If a successful method of service design is adapted then the service will be user-friendly and relevant to the customers, while being sustainable and competitive for the service provider. For this purpose, service design uses methods and tools derived from different disciplines, ranging from ethnography to information and management science to interaction design. Service design concepts and ideas are typically portrayed visually, using different representation techniques according to the culture, skill and level of understanding of the stakeholders involved in the service processes (Krucken and Meroni, 2006). Service design practice is the specification and construction of processes that delivers valuable capacities for action to a particular customer. Service design practice can be both tangible and intangible and it can involve artifacts or other elements such as communication, environment and behaviors. Several authors of service design theory including Pierre Eiglier, Richard Normann, Nicola Morelli, emphasize that services come to existence at the same moment they are being provided and used. In contrast, products are created and 'exist' before being purchased and used. While a designer can prescribe the exact configuration of a product, s/he cannot prescribe in the same way the result of the interaction between customers and service providers, nor can s/he prescribe the form and characteristics of any emotional value produced by the service. Consequently, service design is an activity that, among other things, suggests behavioral patterns or 'scripts' to the actors interacting in the service. Understanding how these patterns interweave and support each other are important aspects of the character of design and service. This allows greater customer freedom, and better provider adaptability to the customers' behavior. Early contributions to service design were made by G. Lynn Shostack, a bank and marketing manager and consultant, in the form of written articles and books. The activity of designing service was considered to be part of the domain of marketing and management disciplines in the early years. For instance, in 1982 Shostack proposed the integration of the design of material components (products) and immaterial components (services). This design process, according to Shostack, can be documented and codified using a 'service blueprint' to map the sequence of events in a service and its essential functions in an objective and explicit manner. A service blueprint is an extension of a customer journey map, and this document specifies all the interactions a customer has with an organization throughout their customer lifecycle. Servicescape is a model developed by B.H. Booms and Mary Jo Bitner to emphasize the impact of the physical environment in which a service process takes place and to explain the behavior of people within the service environment, with a view to designing environments that accomplish organizational goals in terms of achieving desired behavioral responses. In 1991, service design was first introduced as a design discipline by professors Michael Erlhoff and Brigit Mager at Köln International School of Design (KISD). In 2004, the Service Design Network was launched by Köln International School of Design, Carnegie Mellon University, Linköpings Universitet, Politecnico di Milano and Domus Academy in order to create an international network for service design academics and professionals. In 2001, Livework, the first service design and innovation consultancy, opened for business in London. In 2003, Engine, initially founded in 2000 in London as an ideation company, positioned themselves as a service design consultancy. The 2018 book, This Is Service Design Doing: Applying Service Design Thinking in the Real World, by Adam Lawrence, Jakob Schneider, Marc Stickdorn, and Markus Edgar Hormess, proposes six service design principles: