8/7/2019 The New Wave of Innovation: Service Design by Goncalves
and Saco
1/2
51
The New Wave of Innovation:Service Design
Alexis P. Goncalves1
and Roberto M. Saco2
1Innovation Insights, USA. [email protected];
2Aporia Advisors, USA
INTRODUCTION TO SERVICE DESIGN (LETS START WITH A BIT OF
CONTEXT) A Changing Business WorldService Science, Service
Engineering, Service Designwhile not interchangeable, are all terms
for anemerging discipline which attempts to join the worlds of
business, design, change management, and theservice economy for a
multi-sided approach to the introduction and sustainability of
services. Thoughmanufacturing has been the dominant logic in the
business world for most of the 20th Century 1, thepanorama is
changing quickly as the service sector becomes ever more prevalent,
comprising 70% to80% of GDP in many developed countries. And while
theres an established consensus that service isdifferent from
manufacturing, practitioners and experts alike still insist on
employing tools developedon the factory floor for use in a service
culture. Service Science, and more fundamentally ServiceDesign,
posits that we need to codify the language and artifacts of the
world of service. In fact, we mayneed to create an entirely new
language of service. The landscape in this arena is shifting. While
themore academic Service Science seems to have currency in major
American universities, Service Designowes quite a bit of its origin
to both American and British design consultancies, notably IDEO,
andpublic institutions in England and Germany like the UK Design
Council in London and KISD inCologne. Service Design not only
accepts that service is different, but acts on this premise
byemploying features which include co-creation, constant reframing,
multi-disciplinary collaboration,capacity-building, and sustaining
change. A multitude of tools, many from the social sciences,
arebrought to bear on problems all under the banner of design as an
organizing principle and leitmotif.
Enter Service DesignThat design itself is in the forefront of
public discourse bears little surprise. The extent and depth of
theconversation, however, seem to be taking a greater urgency. And
businesses of all ilks are payinggreater attention. Trendspotters
and explicators 2 in the field of design point to a democratization
of tasteand a wider appreciation of practical beauty, coupled with
enabling technologies. Virginia Postrelmakes the case that our
society is gleefully immersed in a binge of fashion and style. And
furthermore,this prettification is overall for the good. For many
designers, engineers, and architects, though, theclaim is anathema
for it counters their hard-won efforts at making design a
problem-solving discipline.Concurrently, interaction design and
affective design 3 have come to the fore; the first, attempting
tomanage interface issues and a mediated world where technology has
become an extension of humansenses; and the second, bringing
emotion and play into a rational design and engineering mindset.
4
Butjust what is Service Design? The Service Design Network, a
loose coalition of academics,practitioners, and other interested
parties, emerged precisely to explore these questions. Inspired
by
Service Design pioneer, Birgit Mager at the Kln International
School of Design, the network uses thefollowing working definition
5:Service Design
aims to create services that are useful, useable, desirable,
efficient & effective. is a human-centered approach that
focuses on customer experience and the quality of service
encounter as the key value for success.
1Stephen L. Vargo and Robert F. Lusch, Evolving to a New
Dominant Logic in Marketing, The Journal of Marketing, vol. 68, no.
1 (January 2004).2With differing viewpoints, these three stand out:
Virginia Postrel, The Substance of Style (NY: Harper, 2003); John
Thackara, In the Bubble:
Designing in a Complex World (Cambridge: MIT, 2005); and Bill
Moggridge, Designing Interactions (Cambridge: MIT, 2007).3The
Japanese, with characteristic rigor, call the application: Kansei
engineering.4Halmut Esslinger at frogdesign coined the motto: Form
follows emotion. See Owen Edwards, Form Follows Emotion,
Forbes.com, November
12, 1999.5Reference the Service Design Network manifesto at:
http://www.service-design-network.org.
