I read very interesting blog post by Irene Chong on service design. Besides other interesting insights I appreciated the focus on blueprinting, because it propose an articulation of the touchpoint (what Norman would define the moment of truth and others woud design as touch points), in 4 “layers”:
(1) the physical evidence;
(2) the customer actions;
(3) the onstage contact/employee actions;
(4) the backstage contact/employee actions
I’ve seen many studies on service design which just distinguished a front office from the back office, this post instead is magnifing this thin line of the touchpoint and emphasising the various elements of the interaction.
On the other hand the back stage here is just mentioned as such, without the articulation that I’ve seen (and used) in other cases. This is probably due to the design perspective proposed by some schools, which focus on service design as interaction, whereas I’m more confortable with a more systemic view of interaction design, which also includes the design of the system in the backoffice.
In this perspective the design of a service (or a Product Service System, PSS) should be consist in designing new element in people everyday life and in business practice, on the basis of the interaction taking place in the service encounter/Touch point/moment of truth.
June 13, 2008
Adam Lawrence has a very interesting blog on experience and service design. I found his example on experience design very interesting: if you sit in a train and hear the voice of the service guy selling coffee you probably do not react, unless you really need a coffee. But one minute later, when you can smell the coffee of the passenger in the next seat, who ordered a coffee you desperately desire to get one, too. But when you call the guy he is gone already!!! Passengers needs to be prompted somehow to the service. The experience starts before the service.
Another interesting post from the same blog is the director chair exercise. you take a member of the design team and you nominate him/her as the director, than you nominate one member as the customer and a third one as the service attendant. the director has to design the interaction on the basis of the behaviour of the other two acting the service. Of course it requires that the customer behave very honestly…
May 14, 2008
Two people, Charles Leadbeater and Hilary Cottam, are doing an amazing job in rethinking public services. Here you can find a draft for a chapter they wrote on “Public Service 2.0“
May 8, 2008
I found some interesting links on service design, which I would like to share:
Erik Mohr proposes some thoughts on service design in his Blog. In his recent posts he also links to the podcasts of the recent “Emergence 07” conference on service design and to information on Carnegie Mellon’s work on service design. This page also include an interview to Dan Boyarksi, from Carnegie Mellon, on service design
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May 6, 2008
I discussed the need for design policies for local and highly individualised solutions in other occasions, in this post I would like to consider what the criteria could be for those policies and how those design policies can be articulated. I also consider some examples in some relevant areas of intervention.
Continue Reading April 26, 2008
Experience economy is a buzzword, often referring to event-based activities. I argue that experience should instead refer to our everday life and to functions we should be able to manage by ourselves. This perspective would bring nowhere in business terms, if we did not realise that in fact our social and cultural system is in fact reducing our capability to cope with everyday social and routinary functions, therefore it is reducing our level of well-being. But in those terms experience economy is no longer an area of opportunities but a critical area that requires urgent intervention.
Continue Reading April 23, 2008
Our everyday context is the place where we develop our own life strategies. Everyday and every moment we decide whether to adapt to the conditions in our context or generate new properties for this concept, thus creating innovation. This process, amplified at the social level, brings about richness and diversity in local context. It makes creativity a diffuse property of a local context, rather than a monolitical property of few professionals
Continue Reading April 20, 2008
I’ve just created a new Wiki on Service design.
The address is http://servicedesign.wikispaces.com/
The aim of the wiki is to collect cases, students’ projects, reflections and methodologies on service design. If you are interested, please feel free to contribute.
December 2, 2007
After quite a long time, here it is a (very partial) overview of what happened in the workshop:
November 30, 2007
