O Danny Boy

No snowflake ever falls
   in the wrong place. —Zen proverb

Bio  °  Blog  °  Contact  °  D School  °  Extras  °  Portfolio  °  Resumé

D SCHOOL BLOG ARCHIVES

An archived post from the 2004-05 school year.

 

Monday, March 14, 2005

Designing for Service

I started a new class today: Designing for Service, taught by Shelley Evenson. What is a service, and why bother designing it? Services are all around us. A service is a chain of (sequential, parallel, overlapping and/or recurrent) value-creating activities or events which form a process. Customers often take part in performing different elements in the interactions with employees of the service company for the purpose of achieving a particular result. In service design, the "users" are both the customers and the employees.

Services make up 70% of the economy. (Goods are the other 30%.) It's important to start designing services because good service is good business and a well-designed service can be a great business. Customer expectations are rising too. Fed Ex, with their allowing customers to track their own packages, started the trend of customers expecting things to happen in real-time and with them in control (or seeming control) over the service.

Dematerializing products can have a positive impact on our society and environment as well. By making less products and more services, there is a conceptual shift away from ownership of things. Customers don't have to own the product anymore, just the service. What if, instead of a washer/drier, you instead purchased "laundry service" from Sears?

Services are intangible, but designers are good at leaving tangible traces to experience. We can create the tangible evidence or artifacts of the service experience. So is service design really experience design? Yes and no. A service is a thing, and the experience is the environment of the service. Experiences have personal meanings. You can't design an experience (or activities), but you can provide the environment and tools for activities and experiences to happen. This environment is composed of people, products, and places--a setting with resources with potential for interaction and participation.

Service design is about many different touchpoints that happen over time. A service design language has to function (provide resources) across all levels of the system and as the experience develops among constituents (customers and employees), in stages of time, through different channels/methods of service, and at different touchpoints (the objects themselves).

Posted in Service Design

 


Search Entries

 

Greatest Hits
A Definition of Design
Adaptive Worlds
Design Awareness
Ethics in Design
Ethnography and Models
Having an Experience
Participatory Design
Systems Design
What is an Art?
What is a Product?

 

2004-05 Categories
After School (3)
Alumni (3)
Assistantships (1)
Big Ideas (3)
CMU (10)
Classes (6)
Classmates (5)
Design 101 (4)
Extracurricular (8)
Meta (2)
Money (3)
Organizational Design (20)
Programming (7)
Projects (13)
Reading (13)
Service Design (2)
Special Guest Stars (7)
Student Life (16)
Teaching (2)
Techniques (4)
Thesis Paper (10)
Thesis Project (6)
Typography (11)

 

2003-04 Categories
3D (2)
Alumni (8)
Assistantships (3)
Big Ideas (28)
Classes (20)
Classmates (26)
CMU (25)
Cognition (1)
CPID Program (4)
Design 101 (30)
Design Theory (21)
Extracurricular (15)
Faculty (13)
Field Trips (5)
HCI Program (4)
Info Design (3)
Interface Design (6)
Meta (8)
Money (8)
Papers (5)
Photography (5)
Preparation (6)
Projects (49)
Readings (33)
Software (8)
Special Guest Stars (15)
Student Life (21)
Teaching (3)
Techniques (12)
Thesis Paper (10)
Thesis Project (6)
Typography (9)
Visualization (8)

 

Coursework
Computing in Design
Design Seminar I
Design Seminar II
Design Studio I
Design Studio II
Graduate Typography
Interaction & Interface Design
Interactive Graphics
Mapping & Diagramming
Sketching & Modeling

 

Classmates and Alumni
Andy Cramer
Chad Thornton
Ben Fineman
Brian Haven
Elizabeth Windram
Jeong Kim
Hong Ha
Ian Hargraves
Jeff Howard
Kenneth Berger
Kerry Bodine
Kevin Fox
Mathilde Pignol
Micah Alpern
Neema Moraveji
Rob Adams

 

RSS Feeds
Excerpts
Full Entries

 

Subscribe
Want more spam? Sign up to receive this blog via email: