by
Sundeep Bharthepudi
The world is changing and peoples buying trends are changing, products and services are evolving, and technology is growing more efficient every day. What can businesses do to keep up with these changing trends? They must innovate their own company from the inside out. This may seem like an impossible task to complete, however there is a new discipline of business, service design, which has simplified the process of innovation with in companies.
A service, is an intangible product, such as accounting, banking, cleaning, education, medical treatments, and transportation. When dealing with a service, unlike a product, there is no transfer of possession or ownership when a service is sold. If you look closer into the matter, one can see that the product of a service is the process in which the consumers experience. For instance, when you purchase a plane ticket, you are purchasing the service of the flight, not the plane itself; you leave only with the sense of satisfaction or disappointment of the flight you took. Services cannot be separated from their manufacturer either, seeing that there is no actual product being produced; instead the customers interact and are given an experience when purchasing a service.
The word design can come with much confusion because it has many different meanings and usages, however in the world of service design, Raymond Turner describes design best: “Design acts as an interface between company and customer, ensuring that the company delivers what the customer wants in a way that adds value to both.” Design needs to help bring out these experiences, to better satisfy end-users. As the concept of product broadens and the demands on understanding the context escalates, more knowledge of various fields is called for, to be associated with the object of design and to be worked out further. This is one reason why design has changed so much in past decades.
The world of service design has sprouted from the realization that the needs of customers are increasing, at at an ever-growing rapid pace. What happens to a company that cannot provide their existing clients with what they want, when they want it? The clients look elsewhere for what they want. Service design is a holistic segment of business, which is about rethinking how a company works, through planning and organizing employees, infrastructure, communication and material components of a service, but also by utilizing the human factor of emotion. In essence, some services (take for example, a cellular service) can be of great quality and innovation now, but five years from now this service can become outdated if it hasn’t changed to the growing needs of the customers.
Service Design is the design of the overall experience of a service as well as the design of the process and strategy to provide that service. Service Design is a process across the four D’s – Discover, Define, Develop and Deliver. It is about understanding client needs, developing ideas, translating them into feasible solutions and to help implement them. Service design and innovation uses many different tools and methods originating from various disciplines. The way they should be used and assembled depends on each projects specified anatomy.
Design thinking is a non-linear creative process and not an exact science. It rather is a state of mind associated with specific human centered design and innovation tools & methods. Therefore, these tools & methods can be used at different degrees of detail and scope and bundled according to each project’s specific anatomy and budget. They can also be used and reused in different phases of a typical project: user research, ideation and co-design, prototyping, implementation & documentation, each time with a slightly different focus. In addition to service management and service marketing frameworks and more common business tools and analytic, service design employs innovation methods that are also used in product design, the design of product/service ecologies, user experience design, interaction design as well as for business models and social innovation. These tools and methods are at the core of the design thinking management framework. Creating useful and usable services and product offerings requires a deep knowledge and understanding of customer needs, desires, goals, fears values & behaviors Many of these tools are thus used to unveil customers and users context.
Reference
http://stefan-moritz.com/_files/Practical%20Access%20to%20Service%20Design.pdf
https://publications.theseus.fi/bitstream/handle/10024/24688/Fritsche_Kristin.pdf?sequence=2
http://www.sbs.ox.ac.uk/d4s/essayArchive/D4S_Publication.pdf
http://www.ijdesign.org/ojs/index.php/IJDesign/article/viewFile/994/340
http://www.exhibitionsinternational.org/extra/9789063692797_01.pdf
Design Denizens 