A Service Design case study

As manufacturing (and increasingly design) migrates to developing countries, European post-industrial economies are ever more anchored to service industries.

Two-thirds of Italy's gross domestic product, for instance, is based on the delivery of services, yet its design industry is mostly aimed at the design of products. Advanced computer and communications technologies now allow the provision of complex services managed and delivered in part through technology and in part, as always, through people.

How these services fulfil our needs, and how we interact with the technology and the service personnel we come into contact with, increasingly shapes the quality of everyday life. But services are usually developed by non-designers-like managers, marketers and technicians-and too often more for the convenience of the provider than the needs and pleasure of the customer.

Interaction-Ivrea is convinced that, just as industrial designers can make products beautiful and a pleasure to use, designers can do the same for services. Good service design is good for the citizen-and for business.

A few large companies in Europe have identified the need for research in this area: understanding people's needs and desires, the relationship of the customer's perception of their services to the company brand, and the methodical processes that allow many people in the company to invent, develop and test services.

The ViVi project describes such a design process: interviews and creating 'personas', mapping the 'service ecology', prototyping the experience of a series of service concepts, and developing a 'service blueprint' which forms the basis for developing business plans and the final roll-out of the service.

Background

IService design is not a new phenomenon. It is a new mix of existing practices, new terminology, current values, and evolved methods and skills founded in the traditional design disciplines.

We can trace the development of service design from a few different fields, we see interaction design, marketing, economics and eco-design as central sources.

Interaction Design and it's computer science based cousin Human-Computer Interaction Design provide us with core elements of service design. Service design shares the values of the user-centric tradition and the ambition to create usable, useful and delightful experiences based on complex computer systems.

The entry of the internet into the mass customer arena brought about a shift in interaction design beyond interface design to creating human communication, mediated by technology. The internet consultancies of the dot-com boom were organised to provide technological, business and design competencies and attracted clients that for the first time sought complete service design expertise. Service design builds on this legacy and expands the scope of design to the organisations and systems that produce and consume services, with roots in design thinking and processes.

The skills taught in interaction design enable us to design experiences in a range of media and modes required by services. "Information Ecologies" by Nardi and O'Day, published in 1999 gives us a valuable spin on designing computer systems by applying an ecological metaphor to system development. Service design broadens the scope of interaction design in placing more emphasis on the systemic aspects of designing complex service experiences, and how the delivery of value goes beyond the interface.

From a marketing point of view Theodore Levitt's paper "Marketing Myopia", first published in 1960, makes the argument that enterprises often fail due to their product centricism and loss of consumer understanding. His classic example is the US railway companies inability to see beyond the train and tracks to understand that it was really mobility that their customers bought. Levitt argues that this led to the decline of the railway companies and the rise of new companies providing alternative means of mobility. This point of view gives service design its emphasis on 'use' and concern with verbs such as 'mobility' rather that nouns like 'train '. 'Use' not only emphasises the customer activity over the company product, it adds the dimension of time to design and requires designers to allow for process and change within services.

In business thinking, Hawken, P., Lovins A. B, Lovins, in "Natural Capitalism: The Next Industrial Revolution" expand on the marketers focus on customers to speculate that service thinking has a potential ecological advantage. If value can be located in the use of a service and the received benefit of that use, rather than at the point of sale, then an organisation is motivated to strive for the most effective use of finite resources rather than the continuous development of new products with built in obsolescence.

From the field of industrial design, Victor Papanek's book "Design for the real world" inspired a whole generation of designers to focus on ecology in product design. Work with the lifetime ecology of products led to the field of product-service system design. Designers such as Ezio Manzini and MBDC www.mbdc.com develop this view by challenging designers to use ecological examples to inspire design that thinks in terms of the interdependence of products and services in systems in the way that species and elements in an ecosystem both consume the waste of and produce food for other species.

Service design builds on these traditions, skills and values in a way that fuses systemic thinking with design processes and a focus on the user experience, ultimately aiming at a world where we desire use more than consumption.

The ViVi project

The dominant spirit of service design is already recognisable although its form is not yet clearly defined. Rather than finding service design a defined practice, we believe in the pursuit of the question; what is service design?

The ViVi project is part of this pursuit. How can we as designers be of value to people that use services? How can our practice be of value to the businesses that provide services? What are the methods and skills required to design services?

In this case study, we show how we started the innovation process by talking to potential customers, using their lives as inspiration for new information services. We propose service ecologies as a way to transition from analysis to new concepts.

We discuss our experiences prototyping service concepts using design methods, as well as sharing the ideas as service models. Finally, we propose ways to blueprint services in a way that incorporates the commercial, technical and experience aspects of creating and running the service.