Dear All,

I have been a silent participant and benificiary of  discussions of this 
group.

The discussion on Service Design is of interst to me too. I have been 
offering a course module 'Service Design', for now about last four years, to 
our postgraduate students of Stretegic Design Management, SDM, here at the 
National Institute of Design, India. The module I have felt, fits best in 
this discipline.

While most of the discussion here, has been around the services offered at 
the top end of the business, in terms of customer relations, there have been 
lot of opportunities for design interventions that exists for the services 
that are offered at the lower end of the economy, such as laundry sevices, 
vegetable or grossery suppliers etc. As it offers best opportunity for 
employment, and in the context of  India and other such developing 
countries - the opportunity to generate that much needed additional/extra 
income with available and minimum investment in terms of resources, skills 
and capital investment, there are many differnt types and kinds of services 
that exists arround any locality and / or business. And there will be enough 
competition amongst these services that pushes them to improve at all time.

These services provides good opportunity for the students of design to test 
out their learnings. These services also offers the opprotunity to identify 
some of the attributes of good services - nationally or internationally, 
and try and apply them to these low-end services. As the services are the 
results of the combinations of products, resources, human relations and many 
such parameters, it becomes challenging for the student to sharply define 
and catagorize them. There are so many touch points that they find, can be 
improved through basic design interventions.

Shashank Mehta
Faculty of Industrial Design
Activity chairperson, Research & Publications
National Institute of Design
Ahmedabad, India


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Terence Love" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Monday, March 30, 2009 2:48 PM
Subject: Re: Service Design - the Challenge.


> Hi Nicola,
>
> Good to hear from you!
>
> I agree. There are substantial design weaknesses (and many outright design
> failures) that come from ignoring the reality that all service and
> interaction is only the tiny tip of a maountain of design activcity that 
> is
> mostly 'back office'. This applies in most realms of design - products,
> cars, information systems and most graphic design.
>
> Looking at 'value-coproduction' in business structures, it's a really 
> useful
> point you raise. I agree, service design in the context of co-production 
> or
> cross-industry/firm boundaries is very different from service design for
> isolated businesses and products.
>
> Bryn Tellefsen and myself mapped out some of the design possibilities for
> these combinations in some papers looking at the role of constituent
> orientation in design (it seemed an  important angle on service design
> theory). One paper that goes a bit beyond  Norman and Ramirez two part 
> model
> maps out six organisational structures that relate to business service
> interaction (of which value constellation is one). The paper is
>
> Tellefsen, B., & Love, T. (2001). Constituent Market Orientation and 
> Virtual
> Organisations. In S. Stoney & B. J (Eds.), Working for Excellence in the
> E-conomy (pp. 195-204). Scarborough, WA: We-B Research Centre, Edith Cowan
> University.
>
> For other papers, do a search on Tellefsen at
> http://www.love.com.au/index.php/research-publications.html
>
> I recommend Bryn's  book "Tellefsen, B. (Ed.). (1995). Market Orientation.
> Bergen: Fagbokforlaget".
> It provides some really useful theory foundations for this area of design
> starting from similar cultural and theoretical perspective as Normann and
> Ramirez.
>
> Best wishes,
> Terry
>
>
>
> -----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 Nicola
> Morelli
> Sent: Sunday, 29 March 2009 8:13 PM
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Re: Service Design - the Challenge.
>
> HI Terence and everyone
> I also believe that there is a big risk in service design at the moment,
> that is to focus on the experience (which I understand is what Terry meant
> by the "appearance") without considering the structure and the 
> "mechanisms"
> that make a service possible (what I think Terry referered as 
> "substance").
> I've recently seen a lot of excellent and exciting cases of designed
> services (mainly in UK). Since they have been very recently designed, it 
> is
> not possible to have a clear measure of how efficient they are, but what 
> has
> been usually presented of the design activity in those services was 
> mainly,
> if not exclusively, related to the "front office", that means to the
> interaction between the service provider and its users. Nothing is visible
> from such design activities, that relates to the organization of the back
> office. Sometimes I also have the suspect that the designers (mainly 
> coming
> from the interaction design area) are not interested to this part of the
> design process, or are convinced that this part is not part of their
> competence (as well as many product designers believe that the mechanics 
> of
> the product should only be competence of engineers). This, I think, is an
> important area for discussion on service design.
>
> Another comment on Terry's post is about the aim of service design: 
> service
> design may be an activity to avoid help desk or customer services, but it
> may also be about increasing the contact between customers and service
> providers. The two conditions belong to two different paradigms: the first
> consider service design as an extension of product design, therefore the
> same quality criteria apply. IN this view quality should consist in
> "serving" customers at the point of contact (or the service encounter) and
> avoiding any other contact between the production system (of the service)
> and the customer. The second view looks at customers as value-coproducers
> (as suggested by Norman and Ramirez (1994).In this view quality depends on
> many other factors, such as customers' experience, the capability of
> customers to define their needs and develop their own solutions, the sense
> of "empowerment" service providers can provide in a service, so that
> customers would be able to work on their own, highly personalized,
> solutions. This second view suggests a totally different way of designing
> services, which, again, opens a very wide areas of research.
>
> Reference
> Normann, R. and R. Ramirez (1994). Desiging Interactive Strategy. From 
> Value
> Chain to Value Constellation. New York, John Wiley and Sons.
>
> 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
>
>
>
>
>
> -----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 Terence
> Love
> Sent: 27. marts 2009 16:16
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Service Design - the Challenge.
>
> Dear Robert, Victor and Roman,
>
> It seems funny to try to problematise service design.  It seems a bit like
> terra nullius - 'it hasn't been discovered yet providing you ignore those
> who are already living and working there)
>
> We know what service activities are and we know what design activity is. 
> The
> issues seem to be mainly about why and how we should undertake design
> activity to improve service activities?
>
> One challenge that seems to bring things into focus is whether it is
> possible to design service activities such that there would be never any
> need to have a customer service department or help desk. From a customers
> point of view, if designed this well, services would work prefectly and
> unobtrusively. Google manages this in the main. Ebay and PayPal try to do 
> it
> and are not quite there yet. Others are trying this approach and failing
> badly  (my local Saab dealer comes to mind).
>
> Reflecting on my experience of 'designed' services, one  thing that seems
> important to avoid is the appearance rather than the substance of well
> designed services. I'm reminded of a university in Australia  that
> eco-designed its new offices so they did not need to have installed any
> airconditioning or heating.
>
> The eco-design did not work. The buildings overheated and froze the
> occupants depending on the time of the year .... but the eco-design
> initiative saved the university  a substantial amount of cash  because 
> they
> avoided the cost of installing the airconditioning and heating systems....
>
> Wondering if anyone has similar service design experiences to share?
>
> Best regards,
> Terry
> ____________________
> Dr. Terence Love, FRDS, AMIMechE, PMACM
> Director Design-focused Research Group, Design Out Crime Research Group
> Researcher, Digital Ecosystems and Business Intelligence Institute
> Associate,  Planning and Transport Research Centre Curtin University, PO 
> Box
> U1987, Perth, Western Australia 6845
> Mob: 0434 975 848, Fax +61(0)8 9305 7629, [log in to unmask] Visiting
> Professor, Member of Scientific Council UNIDCOM/ IADE, Lisbon, Portugal
> Honorary Fellow, Institute of Entrepreneurship and Enterprise Development
> Management School, Lancaster University, Lancaster, UK 
> ____________________