Service Design to date
A well designed service can provide great competitive advantage for a business, even if that business isn’t a service provider.“
The basic concept of Service Design is the recognition that Services have quality problems which can be addressed with the same principles of design that are used to improve products. There have been papers and books on Service Innovation and Service Marketing that looked at the innovation, improvement and communication from an organisation’s perspective. However, the paper that is recognised to have first brought together the terms Service and Design is Designing Services that Deliver from G. Lynn Shostack in the Harvard Business Review in 19841. This paper introduces the Blueprinting tool to design services. Later, Gill and Bill Hollins included a Design-Management perspective on Service Design in the book Total Design in 1991. In that same year, 1991, Michael Erlhoff and Birgit Mager established Service Design as one of the fields of education and research in the model design school KISD at the University of Applied Sciences Cologne, Germany. The Köln International School of Design2 was the first university worldwide that offered Service Design education.
In 1995 Birgit Mager became the first professor of Service Design and her lectures, publications and projects have continuously supported the recognition of the immaterial aspects of design.3 Birgit Mager worked on several publications that have been published in German. Some elements of those were included in Service Design – a Review which was published in English for the tenth anniversary of Service Design in Germany. Mager has been working on university and consultancy projects with Siemens, Provinzial and SwissComMobile as well as massive research projects for the German Ministry of Science Research. In England Live|Work4 launched a Service Design consultancy in 2001. From a pre-dominantely Interaction-Design background they work for clients such as Orange, Telecom Italia, BBC and Sony Ericsson. The Interaction Design Institute in Ivrea, Italy has set up a department that researches and develops service interaction5. The Institue is moving to the new premises of the Domus Academy in Milan as Domus has made Service Design part of their education too. Since 2002 the international design consultancy IDEO6 has included Service Design in their offering. Fran Samalionis is Head of Service Design. For IDEO the move into services was a progression after they decided to not only design products but client experiences. IDEO offers their clients help in innovating and improving the design of experiences across products, services and spaces.
“There is an urgent need for professional exchange in order to better and faster develop the field of Service Design.” Birgit Mager (Co-founder of the Service Design Network)
The London based consultancy Spirit of Creation7 was asked to develop a strategy to help the economic development of the North East region of England. They successfully pitched the concept of a Service Design education centre for managers and together with a network of 200 experts they have developed the concept and the business plan for a Service Design education centre. In the summer of 2004 Spirit of Creation and Birgit Mager established the Service Design Network8. A growing international network of academics, practitioners and businesses establish codes of conduct for the theories, methods and practices of Service Design. A committee including Bill Hollins from the University of Westminster and Lavrans Løvlie from Live|Work are currently working on a paper for British Standards that gives a recommendation on the definition of Service Design.
67
66
Service Design solution | Service Design evolution
http://design-council.net
Today it is easy to recognise the vast growth of the service sector. However, even though Service Design is considered a new fast growing field, forward thinking experts did recognised and established its principles over ten years ago.
Service Design
“It’s only recently been recognised that services as much as products have to be designed. [...]
1 Shostack, G. Lynn (1984): Designing Services That Deliver. Harvard Business Review. 2 The Köln International School of Design (KISD) used to be called Fachbereich Design (FB07) at the time http://kisd.de
3 http://service-design.de
7 http://spiritofcreation.com
4 http://livework.co.uk
8 http://servicedesignnetwork.org/
5 http://interaction-ivrea.it 6 http://ideo.com