“Imagine having a friendly chat while waiting in line at the local bakery store or sitting next to someone with a too loud iPod in the public transport. In both situation your service experience is influenced even though you don’t have any direct interaction with the company providing the service. Companies and Service designers alike are missing out on a opportunity to improve the service experience while it’s unfolding right before their eyes.” – (Marc Fonteijn – 31Volts)

“Principles appear at different stages of a project and can be used in a variety of different ways. Being able to develop useful principles is, in my opinion, a core skill for all service designers.” – (Choosenick!)

“Whether it’s healthcare, energy, tech, or even governmental, services are the way people experience, consume, and pay the output of most organizations. This diverse panel of experts will divulge the basics of new approaches to managing and improving services, plus share ideas that you can take home and make immediately applicable.” – (Slideshare)

“It’s very common in service design to map the touchpoints in a journey and try to optimize every single one. Designing for the perfect balance in the number of function overlapping touchpoints (FOTP) is often overlooked (or forgotten) while it holds great potential to even further improve a service experience.” – (Marc Fonteijn – 31volts)

“I presented a talk at ETech today. It links the capabilities of ubiquitous computing and intersects it with service design to come up with a justification for creating subscription-based services out of (certain) everyday objects. (…) We must think of service design as going beyond functionality and beyond monolithic lock-in, but as a process of addressing specific needs.” – (Mike Kuniavsky – Orange Cone)

“Okay, there it is; there is no design process!” – (David Nichols – itSM Solutions)

“In a world where products are becoming more and more alike, service is often the only differentiating factor. So don’t let someone con you into thinking that you are receiving good service when the opposite is actually the case – well-intentioned or not. If we don’t demand better service, we will never receive it.” – (Eric Reiss – FatDUX blog)

“Finally! – We can now herald the outcome of the new Service Design Journal, Touchpoint, for March 2009. In cooperation with Continuum, we took some more time in order to make Touchpoint a really professional, entertaining and gainful magazine for all readers. The journal aims at creating a forum for discussion and debate amongst service organizations, professionals, students and educators of service design.” – (Service Design Network)

“In the private sector and in the public sector there is enormous opportunity to increase the competitiveness and improve the effectiveness of services. The answer lies in Service Design and Service Thinking. (…) Our thinking is often a product of the past. This is compounded in a world where that past is all about product thinking. The future demands fresh perspectives. Service Thinking provides just that.” – (Ben Reason, Chris Downs and Lavrans Lovlie – live|work) – courtesy of risd

“The design process and methods are not very difficult to learn. For those who want to learn them and for design firms that believe them, there is not much room to grow in the process arena. Sure, new methods are created all the time. But I don’t think they revolutionize the process as a whole.” (Jamin Hegeman)

“From the technical perspective, a service is an atomic unit of unctionality. (…) From the user experience perspective, a service is an atomic unit of activity.” (Mike Kuniavsky – Orange Cone) – courtesy of markvanderbeeken

“(1) How do we change our understanding of the design process in Service Innovation?; (2) What are the designer’s new roles while working with multiple stakeholders?; (3) How would design’s value be recognised and accepted by other disciplines in Service Knowledge?” (Qin – Design Generalist)

“Two weeks ago I had to opportunity to give a lecture on Service Design at the Hogeschool Rotterdam. The presentation was recorded so hereby I’d like to share the footage with you.” (Marc Fonteijn – 31Volts)

“Missed a presentation? Didn’t quite catch something? Enjoyed the conference so much you just have to see it again? Now you can! Below you can find links to videos of our speakers plus downloads of their presentations (some are not available due to client confidentiality).” (Service Design Conference)

“Just as a stage actor and the audience co-exist in the moment to create a live theatre experience that is unique to that particular evening, so does the service provider and the customer.” (Frontier Service Design)

“People are looking for ways to economize in these uncertain times. We can all see the evidence of environmental crisis brewing alongside the economic downturn, and it’s easy to feel powerless in the face of such global forces. With politicians and businesses seeking avenues to a sustainable future, Cooper wondered how design might help individuals cut costs while also encouraging behavior that was environmentally responsible.” (Cooper Journal of Design)

“I’m sensing that designing for services is the Next Big Thing for UI designers. (…) Service design is principally about the choreography of situated moments of customer & business activity as a structured sequence (process) across multiple physical and digital ‘touchpoints’ (ex: signage, logo, store rep, phone call experience, customer service, packaging, instruction manual, website, etc.) which constitute a ‘service string’ or ‘customer journey’. The key term here is ‘choreography’ which implies a dramatic or theatrical quality of enactments of people over time.” (Uday Gajendar – Ghost in the Pixel)

“I had several conversations about what service design is and how it might be different from other forms of design. This is a question I and others have had before. As a trained interaction designer, it was not difficult to transition to service design. In fact, there were only subtle differences that might be identified as different from interaction design. No one I talked to offered a clear definition, or a true distinction.” (Jamin Hegeman)

“We need to spend less time talking to ourselves and each other. There is still too many fruitless conversations spent defining disciplines and labeling people; it doesn’t matter how we define it.” (Redjotter) – Sounds familiar.