with Claudio Pinhanez

What differentiates service systems from traditional subjects of design such as manufactured products and software? We propose a functional definition of services as customer-intensive systems, building on ideas by Sampson and Karni and Kaner. We then show how the presence of human beings and human organizations inside the production process radically modifies fundamental concepts such as process time and quality. Further, we propose that an essential part of service science, engineering, and design is the study, representation, and modeling of customers viewed as essential components of the service production processes. We illustrate this discussion by showing how some of the best work in services engineering successfully incorporated human models into the production model. We conclude by arguing that the complexity observed in service systems is, in fact, a reflection of the complexity of human beings and organizations reversing, somewhat, the famous “ant on a sand beach” analogy of Herbert Simon.

About Claudio Pinhanez

Claudio Pinhanez is a research scientist at IBM T.J. Watson where he researches service theory, tools, and methodology. His current work is focused on service design where he is combining traditional services theory and methods to ideas and concepts from human-computer interaction.
Claudio received his PhD. from the MIT Media Laboratory in 1999, and has been a visiting researcher at ATR-MIC laboratory (Kyoto, Japan) and Sony Computer Science Laboratory (Tokyo), and a featured artist at the NTT ICC museum in Tokyo.