Service Design: An Appraisal

Design Management Review, Winter 2008 by Saco, Roberto M, Goncalves, Alexis P

In this thoughtful analysis, Roberto Saco and Alexis Goncalves map the landscape of service design. They define the discipline and key players, and sketch its potential vis-�-vis growth and profitability. Saco and Goncalves elaborate on the multi-faceted realities of this work with examples from the Ritz-Carlton Hotels, Herman Miller, and Egg Banking. And they wrap things up with a discussion of key principles related to practice.

Service science, service engineering, service design...although not interchangeable, these are all terms for an emerging discipline that attempts to join the worlds of business, design, change management, and the service economy for a multi-sided approach to the introduction and sustainability of services. Though manufacturing has been the dominant logic in the business world for most of the twentieth century,1 this panorama is changing quickly as the service sector becomes ever more prevalent, comprising 70 percent to 80 percent of GDP in many developed countries. And while there's an established consensus that "service is different" from manufacturing, practitioners and experts alike still insist on employing tools developed on the factory floor for use in a service culture. Service science, and more fundamentally service design, posits that we need to codify the language and artifacts of the world of service. In fact, we may need to create an entirely new language of service. The landscape in this arena is shining. While the more academic service science seems to have currency in major American universities, service design owes quite a bit of its origin to both American and British design consultancies, notably IDEO, and public institutions in England and Germany, such as the UK Design Council in London and KISD in Cologne. Service design not only accepts that service is different, but also acts on this premise by employing features that include co-creation, constant refraining, multidisciplinary collaboration, capacity-building, and sustaining change. A multitude of tools, many from the social sciences, are brought to bear on problems, all under the banner of design as an organizing principle and leitmotif.

For this article, we interviewed five prominent academics from the US, UK, and Germany; we also met with three consultancies from the US and UK (Engine, IBM, and Peer Insight) and looked into service design practices at three companies (Egg Banking, Herman Miller, and Ritz-Carlton). The reason for the variety of practitioners, academics, and companies was to allow us to sample the large spectrum of practices and schools of service design (for details, see Table 1).

Enter service design

That design itself is in the forefront of public discourse is unsurprising. The extent and depth of the conversation, however, seem to be taking a greater urgency. And businesses in all their diversity are paying greater attention. Trendspotters and explicators2 in the field of design point to a democratization of taste and to a wider appreciation of practical beauty, coupled with enabling technologies. Virginia Postrel makes the case that our society is gleefully immersed in a binge of fashion and style, and that furthermore, this "prettifkation" is overall a good thing. For many designers, engineers, and architects, though, this claim is anathema since it counters their hardwon efforts at making design a problem-solving discipline. Moreover, interaction design and affective design3 have come to the fore; the first attempting to manage interface issues and a mediated world in which technology has become an extension of the human senses; and the second bringing emotion and play into a rational design and engineering mindset.

But... just what is service design? The Service Design Network, a loose coalition of academics, practitioners, and other interested parties, emerged precisely to explore this question.4 Inspired by service design pioneer Birgit Mager at the Koln International School of Design, the network uses the following working definition:

Service design...

* Aims to create services that are useful, useable, desirable, efficient, and effective

* Is a human-centered approach that focuses on customer experience and the quality of service encounter as the key value for success

* Is a holistic approach that considers in an integrated way strategic, system, process, and touch-point design decisions

* Is a systematic and iterative process that integrates user-oriented, team-based interdisciplinary approaches and methods in ever-learning cycles

Service design, then, is fundamentally interdisciplinary and multi-purpose. Relying on a designer's sensibility, it incorporates elements and tools from several domains to attain various and, at times, competing objectives: customer satisfaction or appreciation, designer satisfaction or sense of accomplishment, problem resolution, economic and environmental sustainability, and practical beauty ("beauty that works").

Approaches, tools, and players

One of the first tomes dealing specifically with service design was Bill Hollins's 1991 Total Design. When we interviewed him, Hollins downplayed individual tools and emphasized the organizational aspects of designing for services. In his view, the key operational question is: How do we organize for services? In other words, how do we bring people into the process of creating and introducing services? Bill reminded us that service design is more a practical craft than a formal science, with its focus on hypothesisbuilding and experimentation. And that may explain the profusion of tools at the expense of consensual frameworks. As Stefan Moritz5 has amply catalogued, there is no dearth of tools for the service design practitioner (see Table 2).