Dear Sabine,
Thanks for your interesting response to David. Without going into a detailed response, I want to build on your thoughts with three points. Like David, David, Dave, and Nicola, I'd like to see this stay on the list.
Your response to David outlined some key issues in research and in the literature. This offers a concise overview of challenges and gaps in the literature.
Despite these gaps, service design and process design are legitimate design fields. While I, too, share David's concern with the notion of designers as new masters of the universe, several new design fields that extend beyond the traditional design areas taught in art and design schools.
Nevertheless, service design and process design are not new. They are simply new to the art and design field of the design enterprise. There is a rich tradition of service design in Scandinavia. At the Norwegian School of Management, several of us were active in service design and process design in a designerly sense. List members who took part in the La Clusaz conference -- and some Australians -- will remember Brynjulf Tellefsen. Brynjulf works with service design from a perspective in marketing and constituent orientation. Johan Olaisen works with process design and service design from the knowledge management perspective. In Norway and here, I work with organization design from a perspective anchored in knowledge management and organizational learning, and I approach these issues in a research frame structured around symbolic interactionism and hermeneutics.
In Sweden, the late Richard Normann of the Service Management Group and then the research group Normann Partners worked with this area for well over a quarter century. Across the Skagerak, Daved Barry worked with organization design at Copenhagen Business School from an art and management perspective to balance his classical organization theory background. He continued this work at Nova University in Lisbon together with Stefan Meisiek. There are more.
If you track these names and their writings, you'll find the literature is partly to be found, often a designerly literature without the vocabulary we use in the art and design side of the field.
While the literature is not yet as rich as it will be, service design and process design exist in fields with different terms for some of the same concepts and processes.
The issues in your note are quite real, but I hope you'll look farther afield to see what exists. You'll find that these authors support your thinking.
Warm wishes,
Ken
Ken Friedman, PhD, DSc (hc), FDRS
Professor
Dean
Swinburne Design
Swinburne University of Technology
Melbourne, Australia
Telephone +61 3 9214 6755
www.swinburne.edu.au/design
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