All posts about
Service design

Let’s Get Physical (With Services)

Added on 10 November 2010 Peter Bogaards
“It is no secret that services, even for manufacturing organizations, can be the key differentiator between competition and the primary generator of income. Customer loyalty depends on good service; not only do customers expect it, but it is part of their values. Recent economic and environmental turmoil is shifting people from passive consumers of products to active co-creators of experiences.” (Adam Little ~ fastcodesign)

What is Service Design?

Added on 28 October 2010 Peter Bogaards
“Our economy consists of both goods and services. Traditionally, design has focused on one, not the other. Laura Forlano talks to leading practitioners in this emerging field. (…) services require designers to empathize with users, to understand interactions as a series of ‘touchpoints’ and to develop a holistic understanding of the ways in which our relationships to services govern everyday life.” (Laura Forlano ~ Urban Omnibus)

Service design at a crossroads

Added on 21 October 2010 Peter Bogaards
“There are a number of competing stories about service design. One is that it’s a new interdiscipline, a mix of concepts, methods and tools from several different fields, brought together to address the challenges that organisations face as they try to improve and innovate in services. As an interdiscipline it is presented as a happy fusion of the best bits of management or business, design and technology, and the social sciences. In this version of service design, the incompatibilities between the values and worldviews of these different disciplines are smoothed away to produce a better user experience and increased business value.” (Lucy Kimbell)

Richard Buchanan Keynote: SCAD 2010

Added on 13 October 2010 Peter Bogaards
“Designers are great facilitators of conversations among people who have wildly different views about the world. That’s a definition of a “wicked problem” by the way. A wicked problem is where there are essentially contested values. Not accidentally contested, not arbitrarily contested. But essentially contested, meaning that there are fundamental differences that cannot be resolved. That to resolve them would be to violate the truths that have been discovered by different people. Designers work with wicked problems. They work with them by the use of dialectic (…)” (Jeff Howard ~ Design for Service)

Visualisations in Service Design

Added on 5 October 2010 Peter Bogaards
“The thesis provides an academic basis on the use of visualisations in service design. It is concluded that it seems like the service design community currently sees services as being not-goods, a line of thought other service disciplines have discarded the last ten years and replaced with a view of services as the basis for all transactions. The analysis highlights areas where there is a need to improve the visualisations to more accurately represent services.” (Fabian Segelström)

A user’s guide to service design

Added on 11 June 2010 Peter Bogaards
“If you don’t, it might sound like something that’s complicated, difficult and costly to get involved in. To help you get to grips with service design, we’ve talked to the experts, read the academic papers and compiled a set of case studies of some well designed services. This users’ guide to service design contains lots of information about how we at the Design Council are demonstrating that design can improve our public and consumer services. But it also contains great examples from design agencies, universities and businesses and public services who’ve used design.” (Design Council)

The Service Blueprints Overview

Added on 14 May 2010 Peter Bogaards
“For some time now I’ve been collecting interesting service design visualizations. But having them stack up on my desktop just doesn’t add a lot of value. As I’ve noticed that this blog attracts a lot of people with an 3 year old article on service blueprints I decided that would be the best category to start with. So I’ve compile an overview of the service blueprints I’ve stumbled upon so far.” (Marc Fonteijn ~ 31volt)

The Future is Already Here: Three Trends in IA

Added on 14 May 2010 Peter Bogaards
“(…) my opening keynote slides and the talk I wrote out which I gave at the German IA Conference in Cologne, Germany May 14, 2010. I speak about experience design, social design and service design. The theme of the conference is Service. Design. Thinking. What I actually said may have been slightly different than the text here but the intent was the same.” (Erin Malone)

Ubiquitous Service Design

Added on 19 April 2010 Peter Bogaards
“Decades later, these concepts remain relevant, and yet we must adapt for new contexts. As Glushko and Tabas explain, today’s service systems may include interrelated sub-systems (e.g., person-to-person, self-service) across multiple locations, devices, and channels; and customer satisfaction is influenced by the extent of integration and consistency across those channels.” (Peter Morville ~ Semantic Studios)

Service design goes mainstream

Added on 1 April 2010 Peter Bogaards
“Reading with interest an unfolding flameup at Design for Service caused by Jeff Howard’s post entitled UX Rockstars need not apply. The gist of the conversation is a few folk getting all hot under the collar about disciplines and domains. Especially the emerging challenges in the US by this new fangled idea of Service Design and it seems to be freaking people out. Which is a good thing in my book. The argument was instigated by sweeping statement from an interview with Jesse James Garret of Adaptive Path, that went like this (…)” (Paul Sims – Made by Many)

Seven Contexts for Service System Design PDF Logo

Added on 29 March 2010 Peter Bogaards
“Many of the most complex service systems being built and imagined today combine person-to-person encounters, technology-enhanced encounters, self-service, computational services, multi-channel, multidevice, and location-based and context-aware services. This paper examines the characteristic concerns and methods for these seven different design contexts to propose a unifying view that spans them, especially when the service-system is information-intensive. A focus on the information required to perform the service, how the responsibility to provide this information is divided between the service provider and service consumer, and the patterns that govern information exchange yields a more abstract description of service encounters and outcomes. This makes it easier to see the systematic relationships among the contexts that can be exploited as design parameters or patterns, such as the substitutability of stored or contextual information for person-to-person interactions.” (Robert Glushko 2009)

The Guardian supplement on Service Design

Added on 15 March 2010 Peter Bogaards
“We are happy to announce that the British newspaper The Guardian has released a ten page supplement on Service Design today, Monday, 15th of March! In co-operation with the Service Design Network The Guardian has produced a supplement themed on Service Design and Innovation in partnership with organisations from the Service Design and Innovation markets. Included are many interesting case studies and best practices with perceivable business impact but also enjoyable and easy understandable examples. 10 Pages, 350.000 copies… great stories! ” (Service Design Network) – courtesy of ronverweij