What Do Tomorrow's Service

Designers Need to Know?

Hazel White, Stefan Holmlid,

University of Dundee, UK, Linköpings Universitet, Sweden

h.white@dundee.ac.uk, stefan.holmlid@liu.se

Abstract

The paper discusses the craft of service design in relation to the outcomes of a workshop held at the

International ServDes conference at Laurea University, Finland in early 2012. The workshop

brought together educators, practitioners and students to explore what skills students should

bring to a masters level study of service design, and the skills they should acquire through study.

The paper discusses the workshop in relation to the literature and suggests that whilst there may

be skills, attributes and tools that are shared between design and service design, the ‘craft of

service design’ is not exclusively ‘designerly skills’.

The landscape of design is constantly changing. Design, which we have traditionally thought of as focusing on the

form and function of artefacts has developed to respond to changes in society, technology and economics, developing

new interdisciplinary areas like interaction design and service design to respond to new opportunities and

needs. Service design covers a wide range of different activities, from developing customer experiences to improving

healthcare outcomes by including doctors, patients and all those involved in providing ‘a service’ in co- designing the

service. The challenges of today’s world mean that designers need to see the big picture, communicate clearly and

work with others to innovate - but what skills do they need in order to contribute effectively?  

The paper will discuss this initial exploration into the skills and attributes which are considered valuable in service

design education and argue that a clearer articulation of these is valuable to both the development of service design

and design in the broader sense. The paper will discuss the findings of the workshop in relation to literature in the

field.

KEYWORDS:service design, education, co-creation,

craft, design, skill

Background – the development of service design

education

As the developed world moves from manufacturing towards service-orientated economies, the

design of services becomes a way of creating value from experiences, knowledge and

relationships. In tandem, the major factors that will affect how we live, learn and work in the

coming decades: advances in technology, increasing globalization, changes in demographics and

longevity, changes in societal values and depleting energy resources (Gratton, 2011) will require

innovative solutions including the design of services to help us negotiate these challenges.

Service design (SD) has been taught in design schools since the early 1990s, at Köln International

School of Design and Politecnico Milano (Pacenti & Sangiorgi, 2010).  New service development has

been taught in management schools and in engineering schools service engineering and industrial

engineering has touched on topics related to the design of services. Tools for the practice of

service design have been created, codified and catalogued with some of the most significant work

coming out of Politecno di Milano and DARC in the 2000’s (Diana, Pacenti and Tassi, 2009). As

service design masters and bachelors’ programmes develop globally, there is a desire to find

common framework and to learn from each other.

The design of services is not new and many of the attributes of service design have been

developed, practiced and categorised by non-design disciplines - the literature on designing

services stretches back over thirty years, with Lynne Shostack publishing How to Design a Service in

the European Journal of Marketing in 1982. However, service design suffers from issues of

definition: designing services is challenging in terms of their intangibility, complexity of

stakeholder needs and relationships and the difficulty in measuring quality in ungraspable events

and transient experiences (Hollins, 2011). Hollins argues that the language of (service) design is

not understood by business or agencies and argues for standardisation of service design.

In Designing for Service as One Way of Designing Services (2011) Lucy Kimbell offers a coherent

description of the fundamentals of service design and argues that whilst management and

marketing theories are well established, the tensions between and the theoretical arguments and

descriptions of different design professions and practices are “hampering efforts to find strong

foundations on which to discuss service design”.

Where is the Craft of Service Design?

One approach to understanding what differentiates service design from other approaches to

design and the engineering of services is to identify ‘the craft of service design’. In defining craft,

we shouldn’t conflate craft with technical skill: to paraphrase David Pye (1968), craft is the

refined acquisition of skill and knowledge that enables a practitioner to recognize quality. We

propose that the craft of service design does not relate only to the ‘designerly’ aspects of service

design, that the craft of service design encompasses crafting empathy, understanding and a range

of additional skills beyond conventional design skills.

somewhere on a spectrum

Service design education has developed from two distinct strands – emerging from design

schools within colleges of art and design and from MBA programmes within business schools.

The Service Design Network (SDN) has been key in shaping Service Design, with a mission of

establishing service design as a discipline since the establishment of the organization in 2004 by

Köln International School of Design, Carnegie Mellon University, Linköpings Universitet,

Politecnico de Milano / Domus Academy and the agency Spirit of Creation. The SDN’s

manifesto (cite) states that the crucial competencies of the service designer are rooted within

design culture and are the abilities to:

• visualise, express and choreograph what other people can’t see, envisage solutions that do not yet exist

• observe and interpret needs, behaviours and technology potentials and transform them into possible service futures

• express and evaluate, in the language of experiences, the quality of design

These are aspirations and ways of working which are familiar to those from a design background

rooted in user-centred and co-design philosophies but not so familiar to those with a more

conventional view of design. Kimbell makes the point that literature discussing designing

services draws on management and organisational theory, rather than design theory, and

therefore sees design as a later stage of the process when considering the look and feel of the

visual and tangible aspects of the service.

Kimbell outlines these two different approaches (figure 1): the service engineering approach

which views design as a problem solving activity characterised by a set of actions, focussed

around the visual and tangible: the ‘look and feel’ of a product and service which is one

component of the engineering of a new service. Designing for service in contrast is a mode of

enquiry which sees design as the development of both the social and material aspects of service,

not as a discrete component. In three case studies presented by Kimbell, service design

companies IDEO, live|work and Radarstation all employed a level of co-design in their work

with clients. Co-design is grounded in the understanding of the experiences, ideas and skills of

the people, who use, need and run services. (Szebeko and Tan, 2010) a very human-centred

approach to the design of services which owes more to the evolution of user-centred design than

lean manufacturing (Holmlid, 2009). Service design education and service design programmes,

therefore place themselves, somewhere on this spectrum between a management led or a design

led approach to service design.

The Finnish Workshop

The proposal for a workshop to explore service design education emerged in response to

conversations on the content and direction of service design education at a breakout session at

an SDN Member’s Day at the offices of Adaptive Path in San Francisco. The member’s day was

part of the Service Design Network’s 4th Annual Conference, From Sketchbook to Spreadsheet in

October 2011. The breakout session on Service Design in Academia highlighted the desire for shared

discussions and resources for educators and students in higher education. The workshop

proposal What Do Tomorrow’s Service Designers Need to Know? What should a masters level service design

curriculum look like? was developed by Hazel White and Stefan Holmlid with input from Elena

Pacenti, Katarina Wetter-Edman and Birgit Mager and submitted to  ServDes.2012, the 3rd

international Service Design and Service Innovation Conference at Laurea University in Finland

in February 2012. (Tossavainen, P., J., Harjula, M. & Holmlid, S. 2012)

The five all have roles within service design education: Birgit Mager has been Professor of

Service Design at Köln International School of Design for almost two decades, Stefan Holmlid

from Linköpings University and Elena Pacenti from Domus Academy have been teaching service

design for a decade and were key in the development of SDN. Katarina Wetter Edman teaches

service design at the Universities of Gothenburg and Karlstad and is undertaking a PhD in

service design and Hazel White, leads the Master of Design for Services Programme at the

University of Dundee.

Methods

The workshop began with brief introductions to current service design courses and programmes,

mainly focussed in Europe including: Service and Experience Design at Domus Academy, Italy,

Master of Design for Services, University of Dundee, UK, Gothenburg University, Service

Design at Köln International School of Design, Master of Service Innovation and Design at

Laurea, Finland, Service Design Studio, Linköpings University and MFA and BFA in Service

Design at SCAD, USA.

The presentations highlighted similarities and differences between the programmes and courses,

the duration of the programmes ranged from 12 months full time study (with part-time options)

to up to 30 months alongside full-time employment. Some programmes were stand-alone masters

qualifications, some were electives embedded within a more general master of design

programme. All would claim to have innovation and multidisciplinarity at their core.

The spectrum of interdisciplinary is many-sided:

• from recruiting students from a range of different design discipline backgrounds to recruiting students from very diverse education backgrounds

• being taught by academics and professions from a range of backgrounds

• working on projects alongside students from other disciplines and/or with clients from interdisciplinary backgrounds.

Prior to the workshop, White collected three ‘must haves’ for tomorrow’s service designers

through informal chats, e.mails and tweets with educators, practitioners and researchers to seed

discussion in the workshop. Their responses (table 1) fell into three main areas: theoretical knowledge

and understanding, holistic design competencies and contextual understanding. The workshop itself was

attended by thirty seven international students, researchers, educators and practitioners in service

design from the USA, Germany, Australia, Korea, UK, Norway, Finland, Netherlands, Denmark,

Saudi Arabia, Italy and Sweden. The core of the workshop was small groupwork developing key

themes and expanding upon them. Participants were particularly asked to discuss and detail the

desirable skills a candidate would bring in to a masters level service design programme and the

skills a graduate should take out. Participants used sticky notes, postcards and brown paper bags

to record, categorise and summarise. Participants also generated further categories including:

implementation skills, the skills that faculty should bring, the value and contribution that service

design makes to the world and ethical considerations.

The results from the workshop (figure 2) were categorized in a number of different ways, but the

key results that will be discussed in this paper are the skills a candidate brings to the programme

and the skills they should leave with.

Categorisation

Post-workshop, the results were grouped under the three categories: attitude, conventional design

skills and educational background (table 2). We have used the term conventional design skills to

describe the skills which may have emerged from a graphic or product-focussed description of

design – early orders of Richard Buchanan’s signs and objects theory of design (Buchanan,

2001). We have used the term contemporary design skills and competencies to reflect Buchanan’s

argument that we have now moved into a new paradigm of design: one of environments and

interactions which require a conscious change in skills and competencies.

The skills in categorisation suggests that educators and practitioners and students have a broad

view of service design with the attributes and educational backgrounds pointing to

interdisciplinary recruitment. Katri Ojasalo, (2012), Director of the Master’s degree programme

in Service Innovation and Design at Laurea University in Finland describes how her programme

capitalizes on the heterogeneity of the student cohort – drawing out the tacit knowledge that the

students bring from different backgrounds, nationalities and employment histories. However, the

skills in collected tend to reflect conventional design skills. Andy Polaine, lecturer in Service

Design at Lucerne suggests that students coming to SD from undergraduate training in design

can be hindered by a tendency to focus on product-based solutions (Polaine, 2010). This is

supported indirectly by Holmlid (2007) where the design objects of product, interaction and

service design are categorised, where the difference between product and service design is

articulated in aesthetics, materiality as well as dimensionality. Because a large number of SD

programmes and courses are situated within design schools one would expect their recruitment

to come from undergraduate design programmes – either their own, or others, whereas one

would expect students on more management focussed MBA type programme to recruit more

broadly. There is anecdotal evidence that SD programmes within design schools are beginning to

recruit more candidates from non-design disciplines, and analysis of this would be helpful in

developing curriculum content in the future. It is perhaps the case that some of the skills in

simply reflect the current state of affairs and are likely to be broadened, more distinctly

articulated or segmented over time. Verbal feedback from the participants in presentations at the

end of the workshop focused more on the personal attributes of candidates: curiosity, openness

and empathy. One group fed back their five key desirable attributes as “personality, personality,

personality, personality, and personality”.

The results from the skills out discussions (table 3) reflected the literature, seeing service design as

an activity that encompasses skills beyond that of design in a conventional sense and draw upon

a range of disciplines and experiences to create a graduate with a range of knowledge and skills

in different areas.

The Skills Out responses have been categorised, post-workshop into: attitude, conventional

design skills, contemporary design skills, knowledge and understanding and business skills. The

emphasis of the conventional design skills category has shifted from technical design skills to

meta-design skills including: prototyping, innovation, and communication.

Discussion

Perhaps the craft of service design is to educate a multidisciplinary cohort in the new paradigms

of design. Polaine (ibid) suggests that the public sector and business are interested in graduates

who can integrate and synthesise a range of different insights and methods – and he warns

against what he describes as the fetishing of particular service design methods such as

blueprinting and ethnographic research in the same way as we have in the past fetishised

technical skills.

Simply giving students the tools of the service designer does not make them service designers, as

Blomkvist, Holmlid and Segelström observe (Blomkvist et al. 2011). They describe how in the

redevelopment of their master of design curriculum at Linköpings University students were

introduced to a system and order of service design tools and methods including actor maps,

customer journeys, blueprints, storyboarding and video prototyping to be employed in specified

phases of an SD project. However, students struggled to identify key stakeholders and had

difficulty visualising the insights that they made from their research. They also tended to invent

completely new services, rather than improving existing services – the improvement of services

is often what a client seeks, rather than a completely radical change. They suggest further

iterations of the curriculum will focus on understanding the context of use of existing services.

This understanding of the context is absolutely key in the design of services, especially in public

services where a working understanding of the socio-political and economics behind service re-

design determine the success or otherwise of any intervention. Bunt and Leadbeater (2012) argue

that there are three key phases to innovating services, including ‘creative decommissioning’ - in

order to improve or innovate in existing service domains what currently exists has to be

dismantled to free up capacity for new or improved services. They go on to discuss three phases

of the process which involve engagement with a range of stakeholders beyond a ‘normal’ co-

design process engaging not only service users, but politicians, pressure groups and the media.

The second phase is the creation of a tangible vision with realistic prototypes and models which

show how it will look and work. The third phase is the implementation and scaling requiring staff

retraining, re-branding and building re-fits in a way that engages all staff including those who

were not involved in the design phase.

The process Bunt and Leadbeater describe involves skills way beyond that of the designer trained

in conventional design skills, and even beyond what we consider contemporary design skills, it

requires an understanding of politics, socio-economics and organisational management. But, is

such a shift necessarily a good shift? What are the consequences on craft and skills? Why should

a designer be better in this than a manager, or a human resources specialist?

Is Service Design a problem domain rather than a discipline? In educating students within this

problem domain, different masters programmes select part of the domain in which they wish to

focus– the skills may be the same, but the knowledge domains may be different eg. - the

difference between designing for business and designing for public services – different

knowledge but similar skills. If we assume that it is a problem domain, what does that tell us

about the other design disciplines? Understanding all design disciplines as problem domains

rather than the conventional view of a discipline as the acquisition and application of technical

skills might help us see design as a shared enterprise, rather than separate disciplines. Perhaps it is

not only the craft of service design that is an amalgam of empathy, understanding and translation

– perhaps this is also the craft of design.

Conclusion

Perhaps it is not possible to ‘professionalise’ the domain to an extent that you can create

educational programmes that deliver all the desirable skills. Is the craft of service design the

refined acquisition of skill and knowledge appropriate to the problem domain, or a designerly

appropriation of skills and domain knowledge as co-constructs?

The workshop was a way of gathering a wide range of issues to consider, rather than an

instrument of measurement. The results are shared on both a wiki and a blog for further

contributions to be made, and it is hoped that this paper encourages people to join the

conversation.

distinction between goods and services

are maintained

service is the basic unit of economic exchange

design as problem solving

(or ‘look and feel’)

engineering service engineering

design as enquiry non-engineering design disciplines

designing for service

Figure 1 Approaches to conceptualising service design. After Kimbell (2011)

Figure 2 Finnish workshop, recording and categorising

three ‘must haves’ for tomorrow’s service designersthree ‘must haves’ for tomorrow’s service designersthree ‘must haves’ for tomorrow’s service designersthree ‘must haves’ for tomorrow’s service designers

role skills themes

Rory Hamilton service designer,

made by many,

live|work, orange.

UK

See the whole service system and explain it to

stakeholders

Being able to communicate user experiences

Learning to prototype experiences

understanding,

empathy and

translation

Lucy Kimbell Fellow at The

Young Foundation

and associate

fellow at

Saïd Business

School, Oxford

University, UK

have theories, concepts and frameworks of

the socio-material worlds within and for

which they design.

have theories, concepts and frameworks of

the organisations, communities, projects and

teams within and for which they design

be able to explain where they themselves are

located and accountable in the contexts in

which they work

theoretical and

contextual

knowledge

Katri Ojasalo PhD, Head of

masters degree

programme in

Service Innovation

and Design, Laurea

University, Finland

Customer/user value formation,

Business value formation,

Visualising processes, concepts & systems

value

formation and

visualisation

Alison Prendiville

Programme

Director, M.Des

Service Innovation,

London College of

Communication,

UK

The importance of the observational in

understanding the service context

The inter-relationship between the business

model and the service system

The relevance of the visual (including

prototyping) as an active and social process

in defining, developing and designing the

service system

observation,

visualisation

and business

models

Fabian Segelström

PhD student in

Service Design at

Linköping

University, Sweden

Services are systems rather than non-goods

Suitable ways of visualising services

Prototyping the intangible

visualising and

understanding

the intangible

Natalie Stephenson

lecturer and PhD

candidate at James

Cook University,

Australia

Understanding the contextual forces that shape a project

Developing empathy with stakeholders

working in multi-disciplinary teams, solving communication problems, and practicing ethically

understanding,

empathy and

translation

Table 1 the three 'must haves’

Skills In skills considered desirable for entry to masters level study in service design Skills In skills considered desirable for entry to masters level study in service design Skills In skills considered desirable for entry to masters level study in service design

attitude conventional design skills educational background

willingness to explore unfamiliar territory

2D visualisation computer science

continually challenge assumptions

3D visualisation education

understanding complexity film making customer service experience

creativity media technology design

curiosity product management anthropology

enjoy listening to other’s stories develop solutions Economics

doing - not talking process engineering Sociology

emotionally receptive marketing

energetic

open-mindedness

collaboration

life experience

pragmatism

empathy

sponge -like mind

ability to see problems

Table 2 ‘skills in’

Skills Out design and implementation skills with which a graduate may leave a masters level programme Skills Out design and implementation skills with which a graduate may leave a masters level programme Skills Out design and implementation skills with which a graduate may leave a masters level programme Skills Out design and implementation skills with which a graduate may leave a masters level programme Skills Out design and implementation skills with which a graduate may leave a masters level programme Skills Out design and implementation skills with which a graduate may leave a masters level programme

attitude conventional design skills

contemporary design skillscontemporary design skills knowledge and understanding

business skills

Desire to change

Prototyping Co-creation Visualisation of services

Theoretical background of Service Design methods

understanding business language

Passion Design for affordance

Strategic thinking

Zooming in/out Understanding of people's needs

Ability to sell services

Motivation innovation stakeholder analysis

Project management Complex systems Commercial skills

Willingness to fail

Listening/looking/discussing

Business model innovation

service design process and method

Understand processes and structure

Understanding of service economies

Open to criticism

Technical computer skill

User-centered approach

Competent in engaging clients using service design tools

understanding organisation structures and cultures

Ability to create profitable business

Active listening

Ability to concretize

Systems thinking

Negotiation skills Being able to study customers/stakeholders

Services marketing

open-mindedness

Simplifying complexity

Skills for multi-disciplinary team work

Service Design archetypes

Justify the merits of service design

Business model design

In-field experience

Communication skills

Collaborating mapping skills understanding context

Be good in bargaining

Empathy Synthesis Facilitate co-creation

Technology - be able to create realistic concepts/design in real world

Deep understanding of customer, value-in-use

ability to ‘sell’ an idea

Simplicity and inspiration

Facilitating other people to innovate

Entrepreneurship

creativity Visualization skills

Collaboration/Coach/teach service design to employees/colleagues

understanding of Service Economy and Business Management

Communication skills

Basic economic knowledge

Understanding of people ‘s needs

Engineering skills as lean and supply change management

Financial skills

Table 3 ‘skills in’

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