Abstracts
Keynotes
Customer-Focused Service Design and Innovation
Services dominate the U.S. and other established economies and are increasingly important to the future of emerging economies worldwide. Significant innovation in services is thus critical for companies, for entire countries, and for individual quality of life. As the Academic Director of ASU’s Center for Services Leadership, Dr. Mary Jo Bitner draws on over 20 years of research and work with leading service companies to share her insights on designing innovative services. She will highlight some of the special challenges for service design (compared to product design) including customer co-production, customers in the service factory, employee-customer interactions, and people as the brand. She will discuss how customers evaluate services, how customers can be integrated into the design, development and delivery of services, and the role of design in creating memorable customer experiences. The benefits of innovative service design for organizational productivity enhancement as well as revenue generation will be shown. Successful examples, as well as tools and methods for service design, will be described.
The Service Design Practice
Oliver King is a co-founder of Engine, one of the UK's leading service design consultancies based in London. They work with public, social, and commercial organizations to help them close the gap between what they provide and what people actually need. Their clients include Nokia, MSN, BT, Virgin Atlantic, Orange, Visa, Tesco, the Design Council, NESTA, the Department for Education and Skills and Demos, the think tank for everyday democracy.
Oliver's talk will center on service design practice. Referring to Engine's experiences he will explore the emergence of service design in the UK against a backdrop changing needs amongst designers, users, and providers of services. He will share his experiences of identifying and developing a commercial service design offer–the challenges faced, those overcome and ones still to be met by the industry–and the central principles and methods that both differentiate and draw together service design with traditional design disciplines and complementary consultancy services.
Service Design—Profession and Experiment
Since the first Professorship in Service Design was installed at the University of Applied Sciences in Cologne, Germany in 1994, the discipline of service design has rapidly developed into an amazing professionalism. The foundation of a theoretical framework has been created, a shared language is emerging, service-specific methods have been designed and tested, and plenty of case studies have proven the value of service design. This process is ongoing and the different stakeholders in the field of service design will continue to strengthen the practice by sharing knowledge and experience. At the same time, an innovative and experimental research is establishing itself at the interface between academics and industry. Birgit Mager, who is that first Professor for Service Design and who has by consultancy, publications, teaching, and research strongly supported the development of the theory and practice, will provide insight into the milestones of this successful service design story. She will give an informative outlook on the networks, projects, and cooperations being set up at the newly founded “sedes|research”, the Center for Service Design Research at the University of Applied Sciences in Cologne.
Presenters
Burnin' Down the House: A Vision of the Data Center of the Future
As intentional efforts to design services gain hold and become to be considered sciences, commensurate design efforts for infrastructures that support the services will also require rigorous focus. Some of these design efforts might lead to fundamental changes in how computing power is delivered, especially in a global economy and global workforce. The design implications to existing methods of interaction inside the data center span the scope of today’s environment: building, product, human interaction, and service. These changes require a systems approach to designing a methodology to update and upgrade the products–hardware and software–in this environment, including the implied human interaction characteristics. Our paper focuses on data centers, the problems being faced today, and proposes some potential changes for the not-too-distant future, including data center design, associated product considerations, and associated human interaction scenarios.
Pioneering Service Design
Live|work is a service innovation and design consultancy with offices in London and Newcastle in the United Kingdom and New York in the United States. Having established the company in 2001, live|work was the first service design consultancy in the world, and because of its work in education and the private and public sectors, has been credited with pioneering the discipline of service design.
The economic, environmental, and social arguments for service use over product ownership are what have driven live|work to develop a new generation of services. Services that are usable, useful, and desirable for the end users and efficient and effective for the provider. The business plan for live|work stipulated that the company was to do more than establish itself as a business–it was to establish service design as a discipline. Five years on, live|work has taught service design to postgraduates across Europe, has delivered over 100 projects to over 30 clients, and has seen its methods and processes replicated around the world.
Adapting Heuristic Evaluation to Service Design
Anastassia Drofa, Ricardo Marquez, Rachel Shipman
To date, very little research has been done in applying human-computer interaction (HCI) techniques to service design. As graduate students in HCI, we think the field of service design could benefit from the adaptation of one of these techniques: heuristic evaluation. Heuristic evaluation is a widely used, low cost usability evaluation technique unlike any service design tool we are aware of. The goal of our project is to create a set of heuristics that can be used as an evaluation tool in the field of service design. To come up with the heuristics, we analyzed such materials as current service modeling methodology, user experience reports, and service design case studies. At this time we are in the process of evaluating our heuristics using groups of service design and usability experts. We hope that our set of heuristics will become a useful addition to the toolset of service design professionals.
An Example of Interaction That Values Co-creation in the Design of Services
One of the difficulties in designing interactive systems is devising an appropriate method of human-computer interaction capable of supporting specific user tasks. An increase in the complexity of technology-based services and customer interaction has fueled the development of innovative services that improve the quality of service offerings. An example of a technology-based service, which may provide users of self-service technologies with a satisfying customer experience, is a new conceptual model for this. It combines cybernetic concepts with interaction design methods to offer a means of conceptualizing service systems that assist the operation of interaction between a service offer and its user. In doing this, I argue that methods of interaction design that consider business management processes and support the co-creation of services have the potential to add value to service-based technologies and increase the quality of a shared service experience.
Energy as a Service: Selling Reduced Energy Use
live|work has partnered with the Interactive Institute in Sweden to develop a new domestic energy service that influences consumer behavior–reducing energy use–and demonstrates a business case for a demand-led proposition from a provider or number of partner providers. This presentation will introduce the project and illustrate the service innovation and design process.
Systems level change is illustrated in the process of disrupting and rethinking a long-established domestic energy market–selling an immaterial commodity (gas/electricity)–toward selling reduced energy use as a service.
Service innovation builds on the research concept and technical platform “WATTCH”, originally conceived at the Interactive Institute. WATTCH is real-time energy monitoring system for the home using web, TV, and mobile platforms to make visible our energy consumption and incentivize reduced use through a rewards program.
At the heart of the brief is design for behavior change ie, designing a service system that catalyses through awareness, agency, and incentive, reduction in energy consumption in the home.
Introducing White Space in Service Design: This Space Intentionally Left Blank
In design, a lot of attention is given to the material design object. In some design fields, such as graphic design, the material design object incorporates white space, the space between the content. Graphic designers implicitly use white space to create readability, structure, and genre expectations as well as aesthetics in their designs. However, in the traditional rhetoric of design, where function meets form, instrumental functionality and the form of the material/content is often what is referred to. Such a highlighting strategy institutionalizes the focus on the tangible product, the performable action, and other visible aspects.
In this paper, I present a set of modeling techniques to highlight the white space of service design, relying on service design methods for the basic modeling. These models focus on the content of the service experience, without especially highlighting the importance of white space for designers to consider. But I structure them with an analysis of what white spaces there are in the services to be designed. Finally, I propose a set of possible ways to study white space in service design.
The New Service of Service Design
The toolbox that designers call upon to create products for organizations will not be enough for them to design services. Product design is hardwired into its form whereas service design is ultimately expressed through the people of the organization. For service design to be sustained it must move toward transforming the organization and the creating of a design culture. This means the service designer has three new tasks to ensure their product continues to emerge and establish itself in the mainstream of business: (1) Articulate the method of design in a way the organization can assimilate and utilize as a 'way of doing and thinking'. (2) Directly involve the organization in research that brings a new perspective and understanding on who the customer is, what it is they do and what they value. (3) Collaborate with and equip the organization's people on the design of new services. By using the case study of how design is transforming the products, services and culture of one of Australia's banks, the different methods, techniques and tools to achieve these three tasks will be explored.
Why Most Services Fail to Deliver
This presentation will focus on the theory and application of Service Usability. Since service design is still an emerging discipline, the vast majority of existing services are not designed, let alone tested. This means that most service providers don’t know where or why their service fails.
Service Usability is a new methodology that takes techniques pioneered on the web and uses them to analyse and improve services delivered in the real world. It audits the customers’ service experience across all channels and touchpoints which helps align the business to deliver a service that customers can actually use, enjoy, and benefit from.
The Service Usability methodology audits and measures the accessibility, usability, experience and proposition of a service. This is done online and offline, in print and face-to-face—wherever a customer comes into contact with the service.
Shadowing a customer’s entire journey through the service to analyse and measure the results not only reveals how customers use a service, and where they encounter problems, but most importantly why they have problems and what they would like to have happen differently.
Service Usability then measures how successfully the service is delivered across the four different service dimensions of accessibility, usability, experience, and proposition, using a benchmark called the SU Index, to use comparatively for internal improvement, and externally against competitors.
Using case studies we will illustrate how this methodology provides a far more effective and usable way of ensuring customers’ needs are met compared with traditional research user satisfaction surveys.
The Service Design Revolution in Hard Goods Retailing
Big box retail discounters and online etailers are commoditizing hard goods by competing on low prices, forcing traditional specialty retailers to radically evolve in order to survive. If the specialty retailers cannot compete on merchandise prices, they must clothe or complement the merchandise with irreproducible services. The foundation for the evolution is based on the highest spending demographic mass market: Generation X. A case study is presented, focusing on the photo-digital imaging industry. Gen X moms are the key decision maker in the imaging industry, being the primary owner and user of digital cameras and of having the images printed at retail. Gen X mom’s lifestyle is profiled, and a future concept of a brick-and-mortar store is designed to match the profile. The key contribution of this concept is the departmentalizing of the store into photo-related lifestyle activity centers rather than into merchandise departments. Each center is service-based.
Designing New Public Services
Britain’s National Health Service was designed in the late 19th century to cure infectious diseases and provide standardized treatment to a standardized population. In the 21st century we are facing an epidemic of chronic disease set to cripple the United Kingdom’s economy by 2050. It cannot be solved by more and better hospitals. Preventative solutions depend on the actions people take in their everyday lives–eating healthy food, taking exercise. We need new types of healthcare services that will support people to self-manage their conditions and engage them in taking responsibility for their own health. The answer lies not in services delivered by institutions but in services co-created by users and professionals. Communities of co-creation exist in software and other fields. How can we design these for healthcare?
Last year RED worked with people, healthcare professionals, policymakers, economists, and psychologists to design and prototype two new services: one to help people live well with diabetes and one to support older people to stay fit. We developed insights into designing the tools, platforms, roles, touchpoints, and incentives for co-created services, and new methodologies for prototyping these services in run-time.