With my focus on co-designing practices, this thesis also relates to the field of service design (SD). In the following section, I will briefly posi-tion my views of this relatively new field with sustainable and holistic ap-proaches of co-designing, discuss how this field, in my experience, can add important holistic focuses and approaches to interaction design (IxD) and participatory design (PD),23 and position this work in relation to cur-rent popular books and research in the field. Additionally, I will argue that some of the practical ways of working and perspectives of SD I views as important ‘materials’ of the co-designer.
While GK VanPatter positions SD as a quite classic design discipline (2.0 – see above), I would argue that this depends very much on how it is carried out. More specifically, I argue that it depends on whether services are de-signed for or co-dede-signed with various stakeholders. Both practices seem to take place today. If designers (often based on initial field studies) design the whole service for others (providers and users), then I argue that the providers (at the front desk) have no engagement in or ownership of the proposed solutions/the available touchpoints, and they might not have any backstage support in their organization or network either.
Yet, as services are not finished products when leaving the hands of the designers, but rather can be seen as continually ‘lived’ by people (users
23 The holistic focus in many ways resembles what I call skills of ’drawing together’.
See Foreword: Program / P&A – later on my third research approach / Part D.
P&A – later Part A, B, C Chapter 2
P&A – later
and providers) over time, others within the field of SD already address the need for co-designing services with relevant stakeholders (This view partly overlaps with Holmlid, 2009). It is the main focus at the ServDes 2012 conference entitled ‘Co-creating Services’24. Thus, if services are viewed and co-created or co-designed as parts of larger organizational, social, sustainable, economical systems, SD cannot be understood simply in terms of classic design, but, in my view, as clearly merging with what VanPatter calls transformation design.25
Service design is a field generally with a sustainable and holistic focus As the first company calling itself a ‘service design’ consultancy, as told in an interview, LiveWork was founded in 2001 in opposition to designers who would “just” repeatedly produce more and more products (tangible as well as intangible) for the consumer market (Moggridge, 2007). Several of the founders previously worked as industrial designers, and they felt a need for more sustainable and holistic design views and approaches – cap-tured in their concept of Service Thinking, which they continually apply to a variety of domains (Livework, 2012).26
Generally, SD is about holistic solutions and the creation of value (not only economical and market-driven), and in this perspective it can, in many ways, be viewed as a new (design) mindset for change. It is a mindset that interferes with existing social, organizational, and economic structures and as such the field of SD has a very inter-disciplinary foundation and practice (e.g. Stickdorn and Schneider, 2010:28). It is a field that acknowl-edges how designing happens in a complex world, as interestingly de-scribed by John Thackara’s In the Bubble (Thackara, 2006); a field that fo-cuses on ‘drawing together’.
Service design adds practical ways of working
SD, IxD and PD largely apply a user/people-oriented approach through probes, anthropological observations and contextual interviews (Stick-dorn and Schneider, 2010: e.g. 108, 156, 168, 172, 178). Prototyping and role-playing interactions and experiences are also integral parts of these fields (ibid:e.g. 192, 208). Likewise sketching interacts by working with sce-narios and storyboards; but also working with more detailed ‘customer journeys’ or ‘user journeys’ and the much more detailed and leveled
‘ser-24 The international Service Design Network (sdn) hosted the first European conference on service design in Amsterdam, Holland in November 2008 (sdn – www.service-design-
network.org). The first academic conference on service design and (design-related) service innovation (now called ‘ServDes’) took place in 2009 in Oslo, Norway. The third ServDes 2012 will take place in Espoo, Finland and has the title ‘Co-Creating Services’.
Service design researchers are also organized in this online network:
www.servicedesignresearch.com
25 It is this last view I argue for and emphasize when discussing and teaching service co- designing perspectives and approaches. My focuses of combining holistic SD practical
ways of working with sustainable and social innovation intensions have, to a large degree, developed thanks to close collaboration with Anders Emilson at K3 / Malmö University.
26 While an industrial design student I surely had similar thoughts around that time too – see above (section on 'Modes of inquiry').
vice blueprints’ very common in SD, adds to the focus on the use situation in IxD (ibid:e.g. 184, 186, 158, 204), Dan Saffer speaks about how ‘service journeys’ are composed of series of ‘moments’, in which interaction typi-cally involves a complex network of people, environment(s), object(s) and process(es) (Saffer, 2007:176) – all considered asservice ‘touchpoints’.
Also, related to architectural practices, in my view, a very important ap-proach in and addition from SD, is working with various types of ‘map-pings’ (2D and 3D), ‘service ecologies’, again typically drawing together a mixture of people, things, environments and processes or activities (Mog-gridge, 2007:414) (Stickdorn and Schneider, 2010:150, 176, 210). Practi-cally, these can be used for identification of current and new relations and possible ‘gaps’ and potentials where design initiatives might make a dif-ference (e.g. 1508).
Lastly, within IxD there is a major focus on (end) user experiences, at a con-ceptual level sometimes naively assuming that the systems behind the in-terface are just working smoothly. Here, SD suggests paying equal attention both to the so called ‘frontstage’ and ‘backstage’ of a service (e.g. 1508:70 / Stickdorn and Schneider, 2010 :41).27 In brief, a focus on the ‘frontstage’
captures all the touchpoints (people, things, places, signage, etc.) that the end-users are in contact with, but an exploration of the ‘backstage’ and all the people/actors, their different roles and relations, the places and things/
tools the service providers use to interact and provide services over time can also reveal surprising and innovative solutions.
Service design research is a relatively new field
Yet, as Blomkvist et al. argues, it did not start with LiveWork in 2001 (Blomkvist et al. 2010). In their survey of SD research, these authors ar-gue that Italian design researcher Ezio Manzini and others were publish-ing about SD already in the early 1990s (Manzini, 1993 / summarized in:
Pacenti & Sangiorgi, 2010). Supported by research in other fields, these authors were highlighting and positioning SD in relation to other design fields, such as IxD where many researchers came from. Again, one topic here was the shared interest in user experiences (e.g. later summarized in: Holmlid, 2007). Research would also relate SD to sustainable strate-gies on product-service-systems (PSS) basically viewing products not as isolated entities, but as a part of larger systems of complex service net-works (e.g. Morelli, 2002/2003), and to work on sustainability viewed as social relations and transformations captured in concepts like ‘collabora-tive services’ and ‘collabora‘collabora-tive consumption’ (Burns et al, 2006 / Jégou &
Manzini, 2008 / Botsman & Rogers, 2010 / Meroni & Sangiorgi, 2011).
While much of this research is still highly relevant, it is not yet really re-cognized in the collection on recent books on SD – for example: In Desig-ning Interactions and DesigDesig-ning for Interactions (1st Edition) there are
27 The phrases of ’frontstage’ and ’backstage’ were initially captured by Erving Goffman in 1959 as a way of describing everyday interaction – further discussed in Part C / Introduction.
Exemplar 01 partly includes such examples
chapters entitled ‘Service design’ (Moggridge, 2007 / Saffer, 2007); De-signing Services with Innovative Methods (Miettinen & Koivisto, 2009);
Servicedesign (in Danish) (Bechmann, 2010); and This is Service design Thinking (Stickdorn and Schneider, 2010). Yet, in line with Blomkvist et al.’s review also of the early research on SD, and my own critique of Mog-gridge and Safer above, I too would argue that these books are largely uncritical, focusing on case-sharing, practical method/tools-collections28 and e.g. interview-based manifesto-like positioning.
However, from 2008-2009 there has been a shift in academic publica-tions on SD, Blomkvist et al. argue; ‘from justifying service design to research on service design’ (Blomkvist et al. 2010:309). Looking ahead they see two main directions of SD research: One, a widening of the scope of SD to include ideas and practices from marketing, leadership and engineering; and challenging assumptions and further appropria-ting methods within the field. Two, to support more academic rigor in SD research, they argue that the many existing SD case studies must be further elaborated in order to contribute new knowledge to the field (ibid:315). As mentioned previously, my intention with the analysis and reflections of all the Exemplars (even through they have not all be called service design) is precisely to contribute to the development of the field of service design – particularly to co-creating services or, in other words, to ‘service co-designing’.
Summary – Co-designing… and service design
Service design in many ways presents a new design mindset and prac-tice, capturing holistic and sustainable views of today’s complex net-works of products, places, people/different actors, processes and activi-ties intervening in practice over time. Because of this complexity, and because services not are finished ‘products’ when leaving the designer but ‘lived’ in practice, as others within the field are starting to empha-size, in this section, I have argued for service co-designing. Practically, I have also emphasized working with ‘user journeys’, mappings and equal focus on the front- and backstage in the process of co-designing, as fruitful additions to common ways of working in interactive design and participatory design.
Thus, onwards when I mention service design, it is not with the view that a small team of designers designs a service for providers and users, but that services are co-designed with various stakeholders throughout the process.
28 As a very interdisciplinary field, ‘methods’ have been borrowed from other fields such as marketing, product design, graphic design, interaction design, social design,
strategic management, design ethnography, etc. (Stickdorn and Schneider, 2010).
Exemplar 01