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HI David and all, I suspect the question David asked, in the terms he asked it, covers just a small part of design research on services. Understanding the ROI in terms of how design would improve the quality of existing services is a legitimate question, that concern the redesign of existing services or processes in the back office of existing services, or experiences in the front office. But in more general terms design and service design can offer an opportunity for improvement in wider area, for instance they can offer the opportunity to product manufacturer to improve the quality of their offering by introducing service component. Furthermore research on service design can (and in fact is) suggesting new scenarios for the provision of public services (e.g. the taxation service in Australia, or the military services as David was suggesting) and the re-organisation of public policies (see the UK government programmatic documents on public services [1], which, in my opinion, has been heavily influenced by the activity of the Design council and some service designers). Of course at this point the question of the boundaries for the profession of designers and for design appears more urgent, although I feel that whatever boundary we fix we discover soon after we have fixed them that there is something more interesting beyond them. The other question concern the definition of what we should consider as ROI when the client is no longer a service company and, above all, when the client is a public institution. In this last case a mere economic calculation is always possible, but it is definitely a very narrow perspective on the benefit an appropriate service design can provide to citizens. So I would take David question as the initial question, which need revisions, because service design research (as in fact any research on innovation) before answering the existing open question, tends to re-frame the questions altogether. Ciao Nicola (1) United Kingdom Prime Minister Strategy Unit (2007). Building on progress: Public services. HM Government Policy Review, Government of United Kingdom. Nicola Morelli, PhD Associate Professor, School of Architecture and Design Aalborg University, Aalborg, Denmark http://servicedesign.wikispaces.com/ Blog http://nicomorelli.wordpress.com/ skype: nicomorelli -----Original Message----- From: PhD-Design - This list is for discussion of PhD studies and related research in Design [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of David Sless Sent: 2. maj 2009 06:00 To: [log in to unmask] Subject: Re: Service Design Hi Folks, I'm back on this thread which I had to drop out of a couple of weeks ago. I am, as some of you know, always juggling between my responsibilities to CRI and my responsibilities to a wider intellectual community. Sometimes these things run together, sometimes- as happened in the last couple of weeks-they do not. Also, I wanted to reread some of the recent writing on service design with those questions in mind. It all takes time. To briefly backtrack. I asked three questions about the emerging 'designerly' interest in service design: > 1. What evidence is being offered to business by Service Designers > on the potential for Service Design to offer a return on investment > (ROI) > 2. How do Service Designers go about delimiting or changing the > boundary of the Service they design > 3. Are there limits to the complexity of a Service beyond which a > designer cannot exercise control. Having gone through some of the literature and taken account of some of the comments made about my questions on the list, I've come to the view that these questions remain largely unanswered from a design research perspective. This is not to say that there is not a range of opinion out there variously claiming that the questions have been answered to the claim that these are the wrong questions to ask. My own opinion is that these questions are legitimate and largely neglected within the design research community. I also think that these are critically important questions for design practice. But to pick up on a couple of points made by GK: > I always enjoy seeing my friend David Sless dropping into > conversations on various lists wisely pointing out repeating > starting point initiatives and provocatively tossing in the hand > grenade of "where's the ROI beef" however I think the bigger > question for the service design folks is what happens when the > challenge has nothing to do with service....for citizens, for > organizations, for societies? I would not disagree with GK, particularly when he claims that I am wise! Nor would I disagree with him about the emphasis on citizens and the wider society. But that is a question of boundary shifting and simply begs the question I ask about boundary shifting. The point, however, is not whether GK or I think the 'bigger' question is more important, the question is for those designers who want to claim that applying their know-how leads to 'improvements' in service delivery. In this regard, ROI can be interpreted narrowly, in a financial sense, or more broadly and more interestingly, in an aesthetic or social sense. But there is here a legitimate research question. If part of the professional offering by designers claims, as it frequently does in the published literature, that design leads to 'improvements' , then it is legitimate to ask "improvement from what to what"? This may be an awkward question, but it is perfectly legitimate, even if there are better and more important questions to ask. GK goes on to comment" > By the way David: If your clients are asking that you define what > you do in the context of how your services will pay for themselves > you probably need to update your go-to-market strategy and likely > even your services..:-) Those kinds of questions are signs that your > industry in your market is being rapidly commoditized. Just another > sign that it is not going to be possible not to change. Change is > not a theoretical idea today, its a necessity. Welcome to > globalization. Lots of misunderstanding here. First, it's not primarily a question our 'clients' ask. I put 'clients' in inverted commas because we (CRI) are a not-for profit- membership body, and the organisations we work with are always Members of our Institute. This inflects the normal client/designer relationship into a different set of obligations, rights and responsibilities. Primarily, we are the ones that ask this question, and we do so as researchers interested in improving design practice. That is our charter, our mission, if you will. It's written into our constitution. Second, we are continually updating > our go-to-market strategy and our services..:-) And we do so based on the evidence we collect from our research into such things as measuring ROI and other parameters which enable us to discover and then offer approaches to design that are better than others within particular problem domains and at particular stages in the design process. Third, these questions are not a sign of something being commodotized, rather they are a sign of constant change driven by evidence from practice and research. Of course we are all in a state of continual change. Welcome to the real world, global or otherwise! The issue about change is what drives it: blind ignorance, faith or fashion; or evidence that change is desirable, achievable and that those who make the changes are accountable to the rest of us. To return to the issue of Service Design. One of the most interesting service changes taking place in our society over the last fifty years is taking place in the military, where soldiers are being increasingly trained for peace keeping rather than warfare. In our own Country, Australia and a few others, this has been going on for some time. There is a long way to go in this in many countries. It's not long since when asked the question, the Pentagon's standard reply was: 'We don't do Peace in the Pentagon'! Change happens everywhere. But I would have though in this area of service design, as in any other there are questions of ROI, problems of Boundary shifting, (both literal and metaphorical), and contingency planning for things beyond ones control. All, I would argue, legitimate questions for design research. The simple point of my questions was to find out if other design researchers are asking these questions. Following this thread, I have come to the view that many are not. David -- blog: www.communication.org.au/dsblog web: http://www.communication.org.au