15 Facts About Service design

Service design is the activity of planning and arranging people, infrastructure, communication and material components of a service in order to improve its quality, and the interaction between the service provider and its users.

Purpose of service design methodologies is to establish the most effective practices for designing services, according to both the needs of users and the competencies and capabilities of service providers.

Service design practice is the specification and construction of processes which deliver valuable capacities for action to a particular user.

Several of the authors of service design theory including Pierre Eiglier, Richard Normann, Nicola Morelli, propose that services come to existence at the same moment they are both provided and used.

Consequently, service design is an activity that, among other things, suggests behavioural patterns or "scripts" for the actors interacting in the service.

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Early contributions to service design were made by G Lynn Shostack, a bank and marketing manager and consultant, in the form of written articles and books.

In 1991, service design was first introduced as a design discipline by professors Michael Erlhoff and Brigit Mager at Koln International School of Design.

For instance, service design must consider not only the customer experience, but the interests of all relevant people in retailing.

Service design is a dynamic process over a period of time.

Service design is often invisible and occurs in a state that the user cannot perceive.

Together with the most traditional methods used for product design, service design requires methods and tools to control new elements of the design process, such as the time and the interaction between actors.

Public sector service design is associated with civic technology, open government, e-government, and can constitute either government-led or citizen-led initiatives.

In 2002, MindLab, an innovation public sector service design group was established by the Danish ministries of Business and Growth, Employment, and Children and Education.

The design methods used at MindLab are typically an iterative approach of prototyping and testing, to evolve not just their government projects, but the government's organisational structure using ethnographic-inspired user research, creative ideation processes, and visualisation and modelling of service prototypes.

One instance of service design approaches being applied is with the Family 100 project which focused on the experiences of families living in urban poverty in Auckland.