I wondered why no one designed services to be functional and provide beautiful experiences
The term ‘Service Design’ has two origins.
About two years back, after a particularly bad experience with a financial services company, I wondered why no one designed services to be functional and provide beautiful experiences.
Products (some of them anyway) are designed professionally to provide ease of use, functionality and the pride of ownership of a ‘beautiful object’. Why not services? With this disappointment the concept of ‘Service Design’ was born in my mind and duly filed away in my mental cabinet of ideas.
Until about mid 2008, when I seriously began working on a business plan for Guts (the name came about only in early 2009), this was the only origin of the term ’service design’ that I knew of.
In fact, the idea of Service Design has been around for at least two decades (mostly in academic circles) and the term itself was coined by Prof. Dr. Michael Erlhoff at Köln International School of Design (KISD) in 1991. To be sure, individuals and organizations have been practicing Service Design for much longer. However, it has emerged as a discipline of design in the last decade with specialized ‘Service Design’ agencies appearing in the United States and Europe.
Service Design is a multi-disciplinary profession that involves usability, branding, visual design, technology… and common sense
As with any emerging discipline, there are many definitions for Service Design and the industry itself has a very wide spectrum across which firms practice.
Broadly, Service Design is a multi-disciplinary (Usability, branding, visual design, technology, marketing, anthropology, psychology, strategy and common sense) profession that aims to improve a customer’s experience of a service and create an efficient delivery model.
Service Design on the customer-end involves conceptualizing useful services and making services more usable and intuitive. On the delivery-end, it involves designing delivery models and processes that make it easy and efficient to provide a service. [Unlike products, which are produced-stored-distributed-consumed, services are produced and consumed at the same time. This makes it more important to design service-production. Efficiency in production, not only impacts the bottomline, but also the customer's perception of a service]
There’s a huge body of academic and professional material on Service Design available in the public domain
Described above is my understanding and views about Service Design, formed over a period of time, largely through exposure to bad services :-) Further reading on the topic:
- A very comprehensive list of articles on designing and managing services, some dating as far back as 1977. [This is just a list, links or downloads are not provided here. Though, a search on Google returns links to most articles]
- A Glossary of Service Design Terms provided by UK-based Service Design firm Live | Work
- A fairly active section on the BusinessWeek website where contributors from the Service Design industry share their views service innovation and the future of services
- The Wikipedia page on Service Design. Very basic, but nevertheless a good encylopedic introduction to a new topic
- The Service Design Network. An international network of academic institutions and firms with interest in Service Design. SDN was founded and is managed by the Köln Internation School of Design (KISD), the university in Germancy where the concept was first explored.
