The first question: WHAT is service design?

Service design - When you hear it for the first time, you are surprised. It is already hard to define what design is, but service design, what does it mean?

Service.

We are surrounded by them. In developed countries, services represent between 60 and 70% of the gross domestic product. They are everywhere. Each day you use them, you wake up and listen to the radio (service), you go out and get a take-away coffee (service), you take the metro to your office (service), you arrive at work and check your email (service), at the break, you look on the Internet for some plane tickets to go to Roma next holidays (service), for lunch you go to the Japanese restaurant close to your office (service), you go back to work. You send briefing for the new campaign to your advertising agency (service) and the media one too (service). You check the results of the last investigation on your customers’ behaviour (service). Work is done; you go to your favourite yoga lesson (service). Then rent a DVD for the evening (service) you call a friend from your mobile phone (service) to join you …

In this everyday use of services, is there anything to be improved? anything to be invented?
Who is doing this job? How?

The harder question is how. Because services are complex things, they are intangibles, they take place over the time and they are consumed at the very moment they are produced. Lynn Shostack (one of the pioneer in this field) says “Services have impact, but no from”.
Aiiii! That’s a big deal! And you’re telling me you are going to design something that has no form???

Well, it looks like the answer is yes.

Design.
Defining design is a tough task.
Let’s use Ezio Manzini’s definition

"Design is the activity of conceiving possible meaningful artefact."

It’s a very open definition but I really like it. Let’s cut it a little.
To conceive. This is quite understandable.
Possible. It means economically, technologically and humanly feasible.
Meaningful. This is subjective and depends on cultural and personal choices. It is not only technical, there is a human dimension.
Artefact. A great word. It can be anything: a product, an advertising, an interface, a service…

I won’t go deeper on that subject this time, as we have to talk a little about service design.
Well, reading Manzini’s definition having in mind the idea of a service we can already understand something.

I found a definition (from live|work) that I like because it is easy to use for people who have a little idea of what design means (thanks to Apple or Starck, it means lots of people today).

Service Design is “the application of established design process and skills to the development of services. It is a creative and practical way to improve existing services and innovate new ones.”

But we might miss something important if we are not used to design: the human aspect. In service design, the people are fundamental. Because a service is all about what someone lives (or experiences) when he uses it. The human aspect is fundamental for a product too, but the things that people will do with a product is already out of the field of control of the provider. Whereas for a service, the way that people use it and the value created depend deeply of the provider’s responsibility.

Let’s have a look at Birgit Mager’s definition for more precision (from Designing dervices with innovative methods):

"Service design addresses the functionality and form of services from the perspective of the user. It aims to ensure that services interfaces are useful, usable, and desirable from the client’s point of view and effective, efficient, and distinctive from the supplier’s point of view. (…) Service designers take a deep dive into the ecologies of services, into the world of needs and experience of users and providers. They visualise, formulate, and choreograph solutions o problems that do not necessarily exist today."

She adds that “an experience cannot really be designed, only the conditions that lead to the experience”.

Now we understand three important aspects of service design. It is about:
- creating a solution that consists of an “experience”, an interaction between a user and a provider
- dealing with people: user and provider of a service
- designing the tangible elements to create the conditions required to make this interaction happens.

This definition is not closed and will surely evolve with this little investigation. Next post we’ll try to understand the HOW of service design.