Course content
Service Design (SD) can be described as the activity of orchestrating people, infrastructures, digital- and other components of a service journey to improve its utility and experiential qualities. This is accomplished by engaging with people/users and customer perspectives, imagining, creating and evaluating a variety of artefacts that support a positive service experience. This course focuses on digital artefacts in a broader service journey, how they can be imagined, created and evaluated from a human-centric perspecive.
Whilst the idea of service design has a particular history, much work in the field today is interdisciplinary and is performed with a high degree of stakeholder engagement as well as a focus on user/customer experiences (UX). It involves both an anthropological curiosity, a range of reflective/creative practices and an ongoing evaluation of various aspects of perceived service quality.
Digital tools and interfaces of many kinds have found their way into the provision of services in both corporate business and public settings (with various levels of success). Human-centered design is increasingly forms the backbone of may organizational innovation processes, and an ongoing, comprehensive focus on experience and service quality is key to the provision of elegant, efficient, effective, and memorable services.
Goals for Service Design include considerations of usefulness, usability, efficiency, effectiveness as well as desirability and satisfaction, mirroring criteria often used in the evaluation of digital interfaces. However, the interdisciplinary nature of services relies on innovative practitice and a design mindset that addresses a more comprehensive landscapes of the user context rather than focusing exclusively on a single perspective or interactions with a single (digital) artefact.
This course will engage with both practice-oriented literatures as well as the theoretical backdrop that informs SD practices. Students will be equipped with both conceptual as well as creative service design attitudes and sensibilities that can help inform future design processes for service innovation in businesses and organizations. The course will present approaches to human-centric design (the anthropological curiosity) as well as dive into the creative processes that aid the construction of new product-service concepts. Particular attention will be given to the work on creating prototypes and prototyping in the effort to design digital touchpoints embedded within broader service infrastructures.
The key tools on the course will be highly eclectic, but will broadly cover UX-oriented sketching, service design mapping, blueprinting, prototyping, scenario exploration, personas, as well as a variety of tools for data collection and user-centered evaluations.
Students are required to work in groups on a self selected case.
See course description in course catalogue