Tuesday, December 09, 2008

Designing for Services: What do service designers do?


A film I made about service design practice is now available online as a resource for teaching and research. The film was created as part of a multidisciplinary study entitled Designing for Services in Science and Technology-based Enterprises, led by me and Victor Seidel at Saïd Business School, and involving many of our colleagues as well as designers, science entrepreneurs and other academics from design and organization studies. A publication with contributions from many of these people and discussion of the project as a whole is available.

The film adopts a practice theory perspective to explore what is distinctive about the ways professional service designers go about designing or redesigning services. It follows in detail an encounter between London-based service innovation and design consultancy live|work, and g-Nostics, a company offering personalised medicine, which originates in science research from Oxford University.

The film observes the designers as they go through some of the steps their design process, and finds that service designers do three things that distinguish their work from that of others. Firstly, the designers looked at the human experience as a whole and in detail. Secondly, they made the service tangible and visible. Finally, they created service concepts.

This research was funded by the Designing for the 21st Century initiative funded jointly by the AHRC and EPSRC.

1 comment:

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