HI Sabine, Ken and all the others participating to this interesting discussion.
I agree with Ken that Service Design is not new, and there is a wide range of studies on this topic, especially in marketing and management; one of the most relevant reference designers are still using is by Lynn Shostack,(1982) a marketing paper on service blueprinting. Also the contribution of Norman and Ramirez and others have been the basis for the discussion on service design in the design discipline. I've never had a chance to discuss this with Sabine, but I had several discussions on this literature with Daniela, who is working with Sabine on this topic. What is new, however is the contribution of the design discipline.
Here, I agree with Sabine, the literature is still quite poor. I've worked a bit in this area, mainly in the definition of some methodologies that cover specific aspects of service design, such as time, experience and interaction. However I can still see big gaps in the literature and large areas that are not properly covered.
I'm thinking in particular to the contribution of interaction and experience design to this topic. Many of the most recent experiences and cases on service design were in Britain, where there is a particularly favorable environment (a strong push from the Design Council and an big support from the government for the development of new public services and social innovation). Unfortunately those cases are not very well documented, because the designers working on them are more interested in design practice than in academic reporting (this may be my own impression, of course). There are very interesting designers (such as Hilary Cottam, Jennie Winhall) and design studios (such as Participle, LiveWork and Engine) working on this. Unfortunately their reports do not tell the whole story about those cases: they focus on the results rather than on the methodology. Furthermore I found those reports very much centred on users' experience (perhaps this is because many of those designers come from the area of interaction design) and much less explanatory on what concerns the systemic (and organizational) aspects of services; the front office is preferred to the back office, with the risk of presenting service design as the superficial activity of proposing an experience (likewise in product design the designer's domain has too often been associated with the superficial part of a product, whereas the "mechanism" was a competence of engineers). Of course I am aware that those reports had a very specific purpose, that was not academic dissemination or contribution to the core of the discipline of service design, but I would like to see more work on this, because I think that what design can propose on service design is quite new and different from the contributions from management, marketing and engineering.
Ciao
Nicola
Nicola Morelli, PhD
Associate Professor, School of Architecture and Design
Aalborg University
Ph: +4599409928 Mobile +4531124669
blog: nicomorelli.wordpress.com
wiki: servicedesign.wikispaces.com
skype: nicomorelli
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