Characterizing service design

This section aims at unfolding the basics subtending the concept of service design.

It will begin by exploring some of the most common definitions of service design, highlighting the ones used as references in this study. This section will continue by offering an understanding of the objects of design in service design and its process.

Towards a Service Design’s Definition

Literature does not agree on any one definition for service design. Across the different disciplines that have analyzed service design as a theoretical object, we find a wide range of conceptualizations of service design spanning from a phase in new service development (NSD) processes (Edvardsson, et al., 2000) to a multidisciplinary practice contributing to service innovation (Patrício, et al., 2011;

Wetter-Edman, et al., 2014; Ostrom, et al., 2015; Sangiorgi & Prendiville, 2017b).

For example, design scholars Sangiorgi and Prendiville, in their introduction to the book Designing for Service, refer to service design as “a human-centered, creative, and iterative approach to service innovation” (Sangiorgi & Prendiville, 2017b, p.

2). In the recent book This is Service Design Doing (Stickdorn, et al., 2018, pp. 19-20), the authors attempt to research some of the most commonly used definitions of service design. The first they share is by Stefan Moritz, Director of the Service Design studio Veryday:

Service design helps to innovate (create new) or improve (existing) services to make them more useful, usable, desirable for clients and efficient as well as effective for

organizations. It is a new holistic, multidisciplinary, integrative field.

Similarly, although in a more academic fashion, Foglieni, Villari, and Maffei (2018, p. 18) describe service design as follows:

Service design involves the capability of connecting the needs of customers with those of the organization, improving the quality of experiences, and supporting the

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organization in creating value, reducing the delivery gap, and differentiating from competitors.

They both mention the centrality of the human experience, be it client or customer, and the paramount importance of the service delivery organization. Both needs are equally important and are actively addressed through a service design approach.

Service design enables organizations to create value and differentiate from the competition, thus it addresses business needs. Such an approach mirrors Brown’s (2009) argument, presented later on in the section Perspectives on Design, that design thinking is characterized by striking for a perfect balance between desirability (what customers need and want), viability (what meets business objectives), and feasibility (what is organizationally feasible). Service design is indeed profoundly rooted into design thinking (Kimbell, 2011a). Such a connection becomes even more apparent in the detailed and articulated definition of service design offered by Stickdorn and colleagues (2018, p. 20), generated through a crowdsourcing activity that engaged more than 150 service design specialists:

Service design helps organizations see their services from a customer perspective. It is an approach to designing services that balances the needs of the customer with the

needs of the business, aiming to create seamless and quality service experiences.

Service design is rooted in design thinking, and brings a creative, human-centered process to service improvement and designing new services. Through collaborative methods that engage both customers and service delivery teams, service design helps organizations gain true, end-to-end understanding of their services, enabling holistic

and meaningful improvements.

All these definitions together seem to touch on all relevant aspects of service design.

In the context of this study, I opted to choose the definition of service design formulated by management scholars Fayard, Stigliani, and Bechky (2016, p. 6), who argue:

Service design is an emerging occupation in which practitioners aim to understand customers, organizations, and markets; develop new or improved services and

customer experiences; translate them into feasible solutions; and then help organizations implement them.

I have selected this definition among the many offered in literature, as Fayard and colleagues stress the organizational aspect of service design as well as the role of service design practitioners. In particular, they refer to the aim of understanding

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customers, organizations, and markets; also highlighting the importance for service design practitioners to enable organizations to implement the new or improved services and customer experiences. Such sensitivity towards the understanding of organizations and implementations enables me to connect to multiple organizational theoretical domains—especially, as we’ll see later, to that of institutional logic.

The Objects and Process of Service Design

The previous section has provided a selection of definitions of service design. This section aims to shed some light on the object of design of service design and the process that characterizes it. Kimbell and Blomberg (2017), in a book chapter entitled The Object of Service Design, try to answer the simple, yet challenging question: What do service designers design? The authors identify three approaches to understanding the object of service design: the service encounter, the value co-creating system, and the socio-material configuration. These three approaches draw on different research traditions, being informed by design and technology, social sciences with a focus on anthropology, and business and management—once again demonstrating the heterogeneous nature of service design.

The service encounter focuses on the experience customers have as they engage in interactions with the various touchpoints constituting the service. Service designers control the customer experience delivered over time by designing various touchpoints: “The tangible elements that make up the experience of using a certain service” (Fayard, et al., 2016, p. 6). To name a few, touchpoints can be physical spaces such as a retail shop; digital platforms such as an app; or interactions with a call center such as a phone call. It is through encounters with all these different touchpoints that the service is enacted and the experience delivered. The service encounter emphasizes what happens in the interactions between customers and providers, thus the focus is on multiple actors being (for example) users and customers, or staff and volunteers. The second object of service design, according to Kimbell and Blomberg (2017), is the value co-creating system. This focuses on the dynamic exchanges of resources and competences through which actors achieve certain outcomes for organizations and individuals. Under this perspective, there is less focus on users and customers and their experiences, rather a focus on the resource exchanges between entities within the system. Finally, the authors argue that the third object of service design is the socio-material configuration. This

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focuses on the dynamic configuration of actors through practice, and emphasizes the social context within the service.

While the service encounter approach favors a focus on human actors as having agency, the socio-material configuration approach argues that actors exercise agency through their interrelationships. In other words, actors co-articulate the service in practice.

Figure 2. Double Diamond. Source: designcouncil.org.uk.

Having clarified what service designers design, I will now briefly explore how service designers design. Service design relies on a process that alternates between divergent and convergent phases, which is by its very nature iterative (Brown, 2009;

Stigliani & Fayard, 2010). Such a process resembles what the UK Design Council has labeled Double Diamond (Design Council, 2015), characterizing designers’

work across different disciplines. The Double Diamond (see Figure 2) is a simple visual map of the design process that illustrates two moments of divergent and convergent thinking encompassing four distinct phases named discover, define, develop, and deliver. The first moment (encompassing discover and define) aims at the exploration and definition of the problem at hand. The second (encompassing develop and deliver) aims at the development and validation of the solution.

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Independently from the different stages service design practitioners go through, they utilize several common methods and tools. In this respect, the work of Morelli (2009) becomes useful to illustrate what methods service designers use and to what aims. By building on the model developed by Pugh & Morley (1988), Morelli defines “a framework for a methodological approach to operate in the new industrial paradigm” (p. 572) encompassing analysis and interpretation of the context, development of the system, and representation and communication.

• Analysis and interpretation of the context: Represents the earliest phase of the design process, when service designers utilize methods (such as interviews and observation) to discover and empathize with the actors’

deepest needs and wants. Context mapping and actors’ profiling are common methodological tools used at this stage.

• Development of the system: Encompasses the planning of the service activities in terms of sequence, timing, and interaction. This cluster includes scenarios (sketches of the service sequence) and service blueprints (a process analysis methodology).

• Representation and communication techniques: Encompasses the representation of the core features of the service. Prototypes, at different levels of fidelity, are used extensively to learn about the new service, and to validate and improve solutions.

Morelli shares an analysis of some of the methodological tools used by service designers during the service design process, providing a fair overview. The list could easily become quite extensive if more precision was required by covering the full variety of tools and methods used by service designers. The book This is Service Design Thinking describes 25 service design tools (Stickdorn & Schneider, 2010) while Service Design for Business describes 9 (Reason, et al., 2016). Appendix 1 provides a full account of such tools and methods as a glossary for the reader.

Take Away Concepts

Literature does not agree on a single definition of service design. The one adopted in this study is offered by Fayard et al. (2016) due to their focus on the understanding of the organizational context within which service design practitioners operate, and the emphasis on the implementation of the new or improved service or customer experience by the service delivery organization. Service design’s objects of design

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are the service encounters, value co-creating systems, and/or socio-material configurations (Kimbell & Blomberg, 2017). Service designers’ process resembles the Double Diamond (Design Council, 2015), encompassing exploration and definition of the problem, and development and validation of the solution.