According to one of the great services we use almost every day; Wikipedia:
Service Design is the activity of planning and organising people, infrastructure, communication and material components of a service, in order to improve:
- its quality
- the interaction between service provider and customer
- and the customer's experience
The increasing relevance of the service sector, both in terms of people employed and economic importance, requires services to be accurately designed.
Birgit Mager of the Köln International School of Design gives a great description of Service Design and why it came to prominence as a discipline.
She covers three key points in defining Service Design:
- It deals with both the form and function of services from the customer's point of view.
- It aims to ensure the service is useful, usable and desirable for the customer.
- From the service provider's point of view, the services are designed to be effective, efficient and distinctive.
Service Design - A Context For Today
Service design has only been a recognised discipline since the early 1990s, predominantly driven by developments in Europe and the United States. In Australia it is relatively new, and the demand for service design here is still in its early stages.
Some of the more prominent design organisations who were responsible for leading and fostering service design as a discipline, include:
- Prof. Birgit Mager and Prof. Dr. Michael Erlhoff at Köln International School of Design (KISD) in Cologne, Germany; who in 1991 first introduced Service Design as a design discipline and a recognised area of study.
- In 2004, KISD and four other academic institutions in Europe and the United States launched the Service Design Network (SDN), to create an international network for Service Design academics and professionals, which now extends to service designers worldwide.
- IDEO, who formed in Palo Alto in 1991 now employ approximately 550 people in the disciplines of human factors, mechanical, electrical and software engineering, industrial design and interaction design.
- Overseas, companies like Live|Work, with offices in London, Norway and Brazil, Engine who formed in 2000 in the UK and Frontier in the US are passionate and successful service designers working on some fascinating projects.
