This summary provides an insight into Service Design and how it can help address some key challenges facing organisations today. You can download the full paper in PDF format. Designing better services Download paper
Service Design – Practical access to an evolving field
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Service Design is a new holistic, 
multi-disciplinary, integrative field. 
It helps to either innovate or improve services to make them more useful, usable, desirable for clients, as well as more efficient and effective for organisations. The service sector makes up the biggest part of the economy, up to 70% of GDP. However, services are not as productive for organisations and as satisfying for clients as they could be. Services have a design problem.

Professionals in the service sector need to realise that they are involved in design and use Service Design to improve it. Services have unique features. They are not tangible, cannot be stored or owned, consumption happens at the same time as production and they are complex experiences that happen over time. Therefore, designing services requires special considerations.

Design as a whole has changed and Service Design can address the unique challenges that the service economy is facing. Design is not only crafting details of products anymore. It is a field that designs complex and interactive experiences, processes and systems. It involves expertise and experts from related fields and clients in the design process. It uses special processes, tools and methods.

Service Design arose about 10 years ago. Since then it has continued to evolve through a number of channels and has gained significant momentum in the last couple of years through the development of an international Service Design Network. Service Design integrates management, marketing, research and design. 
It acts as an interface and connects organisations and clients in a new way.
Many organisations in the market today are working to improve and innovate services, and there are many great examples of that in Virgin Atlantic, First Direct, FedEx, however, improvement is seldom done regularly, systematically or even intentionally. That is why there is a need for dedicated Service Design.

Recognising how Service Design can give organisations a significant competitive advantage is a starting point. From there, to get involved in Service Design it is essential to first have a complete understanding of it and this paper sets out in detail what is required to do so. It explains and describes the framework in which Service Design operates, explores existing models, details the six minds-sets required to complete a Service Design project (understanding, thinking, generating, filtering, explaining and realising) and provides overview models, a process and a practical job description.



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Service Design – Practical access to an evolving field
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Service Design – Practical access to an evolving field
ISBN 978-1-4452-0667-7
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