Hi, Nicola,

Here I want to agree -- but only in part. In saying the the design field has something different to contribute to service design as contrasted with management, you seem to be saying that management is not a design field. That's where I disagree.

Some management people take a managerialist view. Others take a design view. Richard Normann takes a design view. 

The 1998 book Designing Interactive Strategy: From Value Chain to Value Constellation by Rafael Ramirez and Richard Normann is a case in point. Using the term "co-production," they essentially discuss what we generally call co-design. Normann's Reframing Business is another good example.

If your point is to emphasis method -- how to do it -- and methodology -- the comparative study of method -- then this is part of the design literature. Again, we agree that the literature is still weak. The management literature is still loaded with managerialist prescriptions and neo-Fordist dogmatics. But then, the design literature emphasizes formalist results and case studies in the same way that managerialist literature recycles presciptive dogma on programming the machine.

Normann is different, and a step beyond. Or better said, a step in a far different direction. Normann's work is based on a bias for action linked to a rich conceptual understanding of social creation in the context of human networks. Normann understand and works with iterative cycles of service design in which all stakeholders shape the result, much as von Hippel's approach to product design grows from co-design by users. This is what makes this a design approach as contrasted with a top-down, programmatic approach common to the management literature.

In my earlier note, I said that there is a design literature that appears under different names. If you want to think of Normann as "management" literature based on his background and the context of his contribution, that would not be wrong. If you think of Normann as a designer contributing to to methdological literature of service design from a designerly perspective, that would also be right. It's especially right if you want contributions that show designers how to roll up their sleeves and work effectively in the context of service design.

Is there more to be done and more to write about it? Yes, indeed. My point here is to acknowledge some of the pioneers who opened this field from a designerly viewpoint. The fact that some were management professors as well as designers should not overshadow the fact that they contribute to the design literature from a designerly perspective.

Yours,

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

Nicola Morelli wrote:

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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.

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